


The Memories of Dogs

by inaspic



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Bare-Knuckle Fighting, Blow Jobs, Car Sex, Character Study, Crimes & Criminals, Denial of Feelings, Friends to Lovers, Longing, M/M, Religious Discussion, Road Trips, Sharing a Bed, Slice of Life, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:54:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 30,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26781730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inaspic/pseuds/inaspic
Summary: "There might be a place to get some loose cash," Nicolò says to Joe's great amusement, "tip money, you understand? This bare-knuckle circus in Dugny.""In Dugny," Joe says. "All right. Fifty-fifty?""Sixty-forty."Joe laughs. "Fuck off."In which Yusuf bails out one of Sebastien's 'associates' and finds his way back.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 40
Kudos: 235





	1. mai, juillet

**Author's Note:**

> for the birthday of my [one and only](https://patrocles.tumblr.com/) <3
> 
> \-- this deals more with learning to share space & exist in general, so there is virtually zero action relating to criminal operations or Rocky training montages, i apologise for that  
> \-- obvious **rust & bone** elements + heaps of introspection  
> \-- some name spellings are altered to regional versions so it could feel weird  
> \-- set in 2013

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusuf takes up an old hobby. Nicolò struggles with healthy communication.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **chapter cw** : referenced alcohol use, mentions of light drug use and drug trade; very vague and brief shenanigans of low to mid-ranking members of the italian crime syndicate; religious discussions, also very brief.

There is dry mud on his neck, Yusuf notices. It shapes a telling pattern from his throat to just below his bejewelled ear. Counterpoint to the shine.

Nicky in his final and only form who says: "Jo."

“Nicky.”

Yusuf cants his head, allows a brief wash of silence for added weight.

“All good?” Yusuf says, for some reason. They’ve never bothered being this talkative.

Nicky nods with a degree of apathy usually unbecoming of someone who has just been escorted out of the holding cell and presented like a difficult child to an absent parent.

“Le Livre is out of his mind sending you,” he eventually replies and moves on.

Nicky does that, nods and moves on. Yusuf knows him to deal with weights of a different sort, adding to it or retracting by way of eye contact and its import.

Right now there is no surprise there, on his night-tired face, and no softness but he borders on some unknown sentiment or lack thereof, a kind of mild regard Yusuf cares not to parse. 

At the guidance of the front desk officer, Nicky signs on the sheet different from the one Yusuf filled out earlier and then two other separate forms meant for non-citizens.

All without a trace of agitation at Yusuf’s obvious newfound knowledge of Nicky’s full name, his place of birth and registration, the date assigned to his birth.

“Thank you,” Yusuf tells the officer with subdued reverence because that’s what a certifiably harmless guy named Yusuf should do.

He smokes with a tired lean on the sun-warm side of the car while Nicky gets his scant possessions from the hold.

There is an unfamiliar air to him when he emerges, more restricted. Or perhaps Yusuf wants to find at least some sign of unease in the collected air of this coke-peddling GAP fanboy.

“Thought you didn’t drive,” Nicky regards the maroon Tempra with a strangely posh form of scepticism. 

“I drive,” Yusuf says once they settle inside, and turns the key. “It’s not mine.”

Nicky isn’t paying attention to him anymore, occupied with the reclaimed third-gen iPhone. His expression carries that dead quality again which speaks more of peace, or maybe composure, rather than the depravity of the spirit.

The radio has long been out of commission with Nile happy to burn weekly CDs or settle for soft silence, so Yusuf can’t fill the space with throwaway noise and, to his mild wonder, he finds he doesn’t need to.

What he needs is to ask about the destination. He needs to make a point of the money and the effort and the favours owed.

He needs to shove this sick, sickening attitude of silencing himself, of making his presence non-obstructive and agreeable to a degree of farce, because Nicky’s is not the company that warrants survival patterns.

So he needs to shove it and ask Nicky where the fuck they ought to be going and drive and piss off to the studio once his hands are clean and avoid the self-imposed deadline for a Courbet the IACC has him do for a private collector because he prefers restoring for museums and detests the attitude of some of the private people, but being picky isn’t economically viable, especially when you deal with the Institute.

And so he would take the piece and avoid touching it past varnish removal until months slip by and reality sets in, followed by the fever-chill of something wild and oversensitive; at which point something else, something more of ice and Sebastien’s post-binge tremors will douse him along with the deeply French condescension of the collector, though mostly from his curator who meets his mentions of client misconduct with an attitude so morose it makes his teeth ache.

But Nicky is an unfortunate reflection of Yusuf except in some alternate reality, not a one-percenter, so Yusuf asks: “Where do you need to be?”

“Nowhere in particular.”

Yusuf grits his teeth. “My place then?”

Nicky shrugs. Yusuf drives.

Lunchtime traffic is always a nightmare in its impossibly long stretches that feed on time and patience when it's a cross-town haul.

The hour is long and hot in the confines of the old car with a faulty AC. Yusuf makes a serious promise to withhold favours from Bastou for the upcoming summer swelter.

“You moved,” Nicky offers when they park by the garbage bins in front of the cobby building.

Yusuf doesn’t look at him as they get out of the car or when he punches the code in, or on the piss-drenched climb to the fifth and last floor.

In the narrow darkness of his entry corridor, Yusuf catches himself wondering _what the fuck_.

What the fuck are you doing, he muses, and toes off his battered shoes. He heads for the kitchen to escape the thought and either way Nicky seems content to untie his with slothlike care.

Coffee is sure to amp up his jitters but some clarity needs to be observed for whatever is coming or not coming.

Nicky is quiet on his feet and near undetectable on a good day. Something subtly loud about him this afternoon, though, Yusuf notes, something in the way the surroundings shift—or don’t shift, as is often the case with Nicky and his curious binaries of impacting space.

“Coffee?” Yusuf offers while filling the chipped cup at the mocha machine.

There is no reply, and Yusuf is mildly pissed off about it because this is intentional, this is Nicky setting up the roadblocks in the pattern known only to him.

So Yusuf has to turn and look at him and dig up some effort to figure out what the fuck Nicky is doing with his wide-eyed face and his double denim wrap of a body.

“Mocha?” Yusuf prompts.

Nicky indicates nothing.

There is a familiar austerity to his frame, now confined to the lines of the small table. He is tapping at the windowsill, his free arm slung over the scratched plastic of the chair Bastou scavenged at some muddy open-air a few summers back.

“With cream?” Yusuf tries.

Nicky allows a brief glance, a second of blank non-interest, then his empty attention is back to the greyscale behind the window.

Maybe he’s wondering about the place and why Yusuf chose to be in it when it’s well on the way to half-rot but the light is good, all right, the curtain wall windows are a delicacy.

Or maybe Nicky is looking for the ghost of a full-but-for-two-days moon in the rain clouds, the fact of which Yusuf knows on the account of Nile’s weekly updates that tend to touch on the celestial in relation to their auras, or the energy flow, or the receptiveness to magnetic shifts in the atmosphere among Air Signs.

“No cream,” Nicky finally says.

It takes Yusuf longer this time—no clean mugs but for the pair of Silencio’s ostentatious porcelain cups in the sink, so he has to wash one before placing Nicky’s coffee on the windowsill.

He then finishes the rest of the dishes spurred by his pathological inability to leave shit hanging in the space once-bitten, half-chewed.

Nicky toys with the pack of red Gauloises left on the sill by a twiggy Trium guy from last weekend; Yusuf had picked him up at Silencio, this translucent creature in late-twenties, one of the waxed-bright and racially-curious spectres dabbling with the gutter folk so far removed from their blue HEC circles it might as well pass for moon-walking.

The spectre smoked, post-fuck, on the windowsill beside the fig plant, a detached sort of royal in his _Luncheon on the Grass_ nudity so stark with its alien glow in the shadowed spoil tip of Yusuf’s kitchen.

He talked of post-colonialism like Yusuf was the avatar for several nations but he also had a lovely rich mouth.

He’d say, “You from Algeria?” and “You look like it,” and finish with, “Denia, deni-ya, masskina aljazair.” 

He seemed to be in a strangely gentle PCP rush when he closed his eyes and opened his legs for Yusuf to stir into and fuck him fresh against the tall glass.

His hands were gripping the useless window handle that’d been long painted and taped over for the winters, and his voice didn’t wander past the limits of tastefulness as if to reassure all parties involved Yusuf wasn’t there to cheapen him; he hadn’t once met his eyes or asked for Yusuf’s name, but he left half a pack of staple Gauloises red and his name and number in permanent felt tip on the refrigerator door.

Nicky makes use of the cigarette pack now. An offensively posh zippo emerges from the pocket of his denim shirt.

Yusuf fills another cup. They share a smoke in silence with the neighbour’s sports channel to keep them company through the wallpapered wall.

“Don’t clean often, do you?”

Nicky nods at the sticky tabletop, then allows a double-tap. The off-white waferboard gives a dull sound as flat as the look on Nicky’s guarded face.

“So,” Yusuf goes for another smoke, “you hungry?”

“Depends.”

“Don’t tell me you’re picky, I’ve seen you swallow car-toasted falafel two days past its edible safety.”

Nicky hums and kicks his legs out, getting Yusuf in the shin with his socked feet.

“Come ti pare,” he says and looks out the window if only to redirect his exhaustion.

It’s all too clear now how drained he is. The pallor gives his skin a rougher edge that Yusuf had seen in rehab, in Bastou whenever he rode it out at Yusuf’s place.

Sebastien couldn’t stand the mirrors or whatever the reflection unearthed, so Yusuf kept his flat mirror-free save for the round little piece to fit in his palm, for the shaving he doesn’t often do.

“I’m doing laundry tomorrow,” Yusuf says. “Feel free to sleep as is. Mire the bed. Soul’s delight.”

Nicky stops rocking. Yusuf makes a vague gesture to the corridor, tells him about the shower and the hot water hours and how the tap needs to be nudged just so.

“Very gracious of you, Jo.”

And here, in this not-quite-bleak afternoon light, a strange new curiosity emerges in Nicky’s eyes, and Yusuf has no choice but to meet it with a matching sense of purpose.

He’s forgotten how odd it feels to be so easily understood and so easily taken. This simplicity is something he wishes for so deeply but can only find it with Bastou on a good day or Nile on a bad one, or Andy when the time feels beautiful.

“I’ll have what you have,” Nicky says, to the food or the drink, or maybe the space. He stands with a light stretch and moves towards the corridor. “Salute.”

Later, Nicky pads into the kitchen flushed and clean-cheeked while Yusuf is unpacking their soggy ready meals and killing off his second Diabolo.

It takes him a moment to place the joggers Nicky is wearing as Bastou’s old university-issued pair. The droopy coral boat-neck is too faded to be a one-night stand artefact, so he must’ve dug it from Nile’s side of the commode.

Nicky’s nose does something odd but definitely judgemental at Yusuf’s fizzy lemonade but he accepts the can along with the food.

They eat similar to the way they smoke, in silence and with attention dispersed between the rain, the drink, and their phones.

Nicky helps him finish the last can once they relocate to the sofa, closer to the socket, which has him bent over the armrest in a rather silly display of texting-while-charging gymnastics.

Gently sated and on his way to a bizarre sort of contentment, Yusuf finishes typing up his proposition of intervention and sends it to Samir because he’s chosen to avoid dealing with the white management where his work is concerned and he is safer for it.

The rain or the soft tapping or the rhythm of a person other than himself nudge him into an easy doze. 

He wakes to the metal clank of the front door and the muffled footsteps disappearing into the kitchen.

Nicky is in a new set of clothes. He is also tip-toeing on the kitchen counter.

“What the fuck?” Yusuf says, flat, at the sight of Nicky reaching for the vent.

“You were sleeping.”

“I was.”

They stay frozen for one fraught moment—Nicky with one hand between the vent’s dusty grid and the other firmly clutched around a g-pack, possibly china, and Yusuf too sleep-heavy to work himself into any form of real indignation.

“Go on then,” Yusuf sighs to make a point and doesn’t watch him make a stash out of his kitchen. Leaving it for potential guests to find could be some freaky form of faux pas.

He needs to isolate his brain right about now. Because the shift is in two hours and he’s never smooth with cock-curious crowd without a can of that dirt.

Because Bastou has asked for a lift home after his shift at Nouveau Casino and the 11th is nothing short of unbearable without a pinch of calm to drag him out of the blur that’s made a home of his edges.

Because he’s spent half of his last check from Silencio to bail Nicky and feed him and now there’s Camorra dope warming the guts of his kitchen and he can’t even fucking say no, or yes, or how’s it going, man, long time no see, not since that absolute laugh of a night when my brother puked all over your van on the way to my old place though the route was quickly altered to the nearest clinic that did gastric suction.

“Got a shift at nine,” Yusuf tells the kitchen wall.

Nicky is unloading an odd collection of dairy and biscotti from the depths of his obnoxious sports bag. Inside it, Yusuf spies neat folds of dark apparel cushioning a pouch of tobacco and a litre worth of Malibu.

“So when are you back?” Nicky peers at him.

“Around six, if the metro is good. Have to drop off the ride before work.”

“I brought the van.”

Yusuf nods and goes to pick up the work clothes from the bedroom. In the shower, he takes note of a bulky cosmetics bag atop the washing machine and a flat-iron on the towel hook.

By the time he’s cleaned up and properly dressed, the kitchen table has acquired a handgun and a ziplock of fast, uncut by the colour of it.

Nicky looks up from his phone and gestures to the other chair. “One for the road. My treat.”

Yusuf can only shake his head. Still, he joins the table and unwraps his tobacco pouch instead. When he’s done licking the hash rollie shut, their eyes meet. Nicky is watching him with the same curiosity Yusuf has come to associate with the twisted way the guy hands out respect.

“Silencio?”

Yusuf nods and takes two long tokes with clinical distaste rather than pleasure. The back of his throat itches a little—it’s been a while.

“I’ll take the sofa.” Nicky smiles with one corner of his mouth. There is unfamiliar humour in his eyes. “Mustn’t put your lady out.”

“We’ll see.”

Nicky taps at the phone and slides it across the table with the new contact tab open. "A line of warning would be nice, yes?”

That morning Yusuf returns alone but carrying the weight of uncomfortable bathroom sex on his skin in lurid gooey gossamer.

Shoes prove to be a struggle, but once again he takes the time to figure out what the fuck he thinks he’s doing.

Nicky is splayed in the nest of mauve sheets by the living room window with one leg bent and his knobby knee pressed to the glass. The pale coral of the shirt goes with the softness of dawn, a retail take on early Carriera.

Yusuf feels lost.

No life in him for shower or food or another coffee, no life in him for a post-work stretch or a sketch-sprint on the balcony. No life like his to harbour a mid-ranking Italian gang peddler on the unification mission with the Corso, or so Nicky implied. A harbour in Yusuf’s sanity for the price of absolutely nothing. 

Tomorrow—today, later today, he will let Bastou know what he thinks of his associates.

Yusuf sleeps in his work clothes and wakes to the front door slamming shut. It’s quiet and the day is already closing, but he feels the tell-tale disturbance in his space.

In the kitchen, Nicky is cutting what is possibly heroin with what is most likely quinine. The wobbly table tilts with each movement Nicky’s hands make. His gloved fingers are surprisingly deft, even graceful.

It’s a day.

“Right,” Yusuf says.

“Problem?”

“Yeah. It’s a problem.”

Nicky gives a long pause. “You're not joking.”

“Yeah, ‘cos it’s a fucking problem.”

“Yesterday you weren’t complaining.”

“This is different.”

Nicky looks up and something sufficiently dramatic must be happening to Yusuf’s face because the task is left abandoned and the face in front him assumes a new expression, this one harder at the mouth.

“Not exactly different.”

“Nicky.”

“Jo.”

“Nicky, this is not what I signed up for.”

“I seem to recall you signing a thing or two.”

Yusuf is taken aback only for a moment. He might be one to issue benevolence all too often, but he is no pushover, and in this exact moment he can’t find the urge to set his reluctant patience in motion.

“There are limits, you know,” Yusuf warns.

“You think so?” Nicky says, slow. “Surely not when Le Livre suffocates on his own vomit in my van." His eyes trace Yusuf’s drenched form. "Or when he crawls to the depot for a gram but only to borrow.”

“Or,” Yusuf says, suddenly feeling tired, “when you owe me in bail. Probably in that Heckler round you didn’t get in your skull after release, too.”

Yusuf knows it to be nonsense but he has to work with something here. The neighbour on the other side is back, this time with the English Premier League with German commentary.

Nicky kicks the red bag from under the table to sweep everything back inside. The stuff, then the gun, the half-empty bottle of Malibu. He doesn’t get anything from the bathroom, going straight for the door.

One of these days, Yusuf thinks, with his tired eyes closed for comfort and his breathing measured into neat beats.

One of these days he is not going to cave in or count to five before diving in blind. One of these days he is sure going to be cut into little pieces.

“Nicky.”

The shuffle by the door doesn’t stop, so Yusuf stalks into the corridor and watches him work the laces with the attention they don’t exactly warrant.

He sighs. “Nicky, there’s no need to impress me.”

One shoe ready, one left to go.

“How about this arrangement: get back in the fucking kitchen, do whatever.” Yusuf waits out. “This works for you?”

Nicky shoves the laces inside the shoe in silence. He picks the bag and is stuck fumbling with the old lock.

This is what makes Yusuf pause: Nicky doesn’t fumble. Or act up so sharply, or let himself sound so shaken. Nicky is not young but he is younger.

Better still, Nicky’s absurd life school has moulded him into something of the opposite end of the street rat spectrum to which Yusuf partially belongs. Ah, he is never sure of his fences anymore.

Yusuf braves a step and clears his chest before taking the next.

“Nicolò,” he says.

It halts something. The effect is clear in the line of Nicky’s shoulders and the peculiar way he just un-carries himself back into vague disregard.

Yusuf repeats the name, this time with an attempt at conviction.

Nicky finally turns. There is caution in his eyes.

They take great care of this silence, so fragile and rich, somehow reminiscent of refuge; it's the best thing Yusuf has felt with another person—an ally?—in a long time.

Nicky nods and goes to the kitchen.

* * *

"Bad choice," says Nicolò and means 'since it isn’t me'.

Rino spares him a glance, more a smudge of irritation than any serious heat.

"Noted," he says and throws the keys to the new Napoli blood fresh from Scampìa or Arzano—Nicolò wasn’t exactly listening upon arrival but something long-buried in him responds with an ache to this kid.

Not the real-people kind of ache but real still. He must exist, then, and he realises there’s been too much of that, encountering the sensations of renewed existence. Of being more than a function. How do you approach relearning life and you, yourself, living? 

When the kid remains frozen with keys in his nervous green hands, Rino sighs. "Go on."

The sky hints at dawn as Nicolò watches the kid back the SUV out of the poorly paved lot.

Nicolò finds the odious fuckery that is dealing with Marseille and the rest of the French Riviera to be deeply unnecessary as well as unpleasant because it kind of goes out of their direct sense of provision.

They’re here to shuffle the contacts about, not take over the ferry lines to the fucking Gibraltar.

"You’re lucky to be running at all after the shit you pulled," Rino tells him after relaying the new exchange arrangements from the Corso. "Your furlough was low profile, I hope." 

Nicolò thinks of the industrial windows in Jo's swampy flat and the half-vintage structure of his building caught on the border with the 19th. "Not exactly."

"Never been this stupid before, have you."

"Calm the fuck down. I was bailed. I wasn’t followed. The mess with the barettos was no mess at all, not with Emirates in town."

Rino scowls. "I need you to keep doing this little sewer thing you’ve been doing. Can’t have you going home yet."

"What about Sicily?"

"Forget about the South until Christmas, Cocò, and stay put. I don’t care what you do as long as it’s nowhere near the main traffic."

How boring. "What do you imagine me doing?"

"Go on a fucking cruise for all I care. Take that new Bulgarian chick off Bèppe’s dick, I don’t know. Just don’t be here with your unfortunate sbirro stench when we negotiate."

Before Nicolò’s role as the official Parisian connective tissue, Cesare wasn’t a problem but an irritant pest at most.

There are days now when Cesare drives him this close to the edge, and today is one of them, so Nicolò forces some coolness back into his mind.

"Okay," he nods and steals a handful of salted peanuts off Rino’s coffee table. "Fuck it, I’ll find a hobby. But I still think Mariani a bad move."

"Again, noted. Now off you fucking trot."

Nicolò finishes the peanuts and goes for one of the cigarettes he’s nicked from Jo’s balcony on the last morning of his impromptu hostel situation.

"Fresh record doesn’t make me your pet. You ever speak to me like that again," Nicolò flicks the lighter shut, inhales the nasty shit the French call tobacco, and says nothing more.

Rino looks uncomfortable but not at all chastised; his eyes flick to the pocket where he knows Nicolò keeps the switch.

"Just don’t hang about, Nico. The kid will get to you with an all-clear."

Had he a hat, Nicolò is sure he’d make use of it on such occasions. He’d tip it in place of a nod which is too much acknowledgement that Rino deserves from him right now. 

Rino, as of recently observed leanings, is aiming for a very quiet expansion of their daily business. They are not a democracy nor they are a monarchy, but Nicolò frankly couldn’t give much of a fuck about Rino’s fumblings at limited ambition without approval from the clan’s heads.

What Nicolò could give some fuck about is his next point of action prompted by him being, for the lack of a better term, suspended.

He should also start giving a fuck about possible living arrangement given his indefinite stay in Paris. The post-bail paperwork reshuffle at Jo’s hasn’t given his schedule much of a window to dedicate on hunting down new property. Might as well take up Bèppe on that offer to bleed one of his dens for a few weeks.

Speaking of bleeding. Speaking of the lack of it.

The lack of it around his person has been unsettling. It sticks to his every move, to the riverbank, to the van.

The afternoon drive to Montreuil is more sweat than comfort, and it reminds him of Jo’s warm ratty kitchen.

It reminds him of Sister Benedetta and the way her garden fogged up the air inside the ripe cut of summer.

It also reminds him of placing the first quick cut with his switch and feeling the skin give way to warmth.

His head feels heavy. It rattles as a snake ensnared, thoughts undetectable.

If not to inflict, then to watch, he decides, knowing Jo’s event should still be going.

The climb of Arena's low steps is short and devoid of company.

The entrance to the venue is deserted, leaving him to recalibrate with a tepid can of coke because he’s forgotten how the real world works and that such events include ticketing and being on time.

He could’ve found his way in but the drive has taken the surface layer of the fight out of him and he’d much rather support the warm concrete in waiting.

Another lifetime passes around him.

It’s the dry blood that first catches his eye when Jo shuffles into the empty lot with Le Livre’s arm around his shoulders. There is obvious lack of attention from the event's medics, possibly by choice on Jo's part, though a post-bout checkup is sure to be compulsory.

Nicolò remains unnoticed, watching the pair cross to the nondescript silver Uber parked in the disabled spot.

There is no reason to do any of this, but Nicolò finds himself giving a long whistle to get Jo’s attention. It’s very obnoxious.

Jo fixes him with a curious look. Le Livre readjusts his sports bag and pulls Jo closer, appearing calm but assuming a new set to his body—a show of distrust. He exchanges a few words with Jo, sighs, and heads for the taxi.

"Did you win?" Nicolò asks once Jo directs them to the barrier in front of the parking line. 

"Yes and no."

"When is the next junket?"

"Next Friday."

"Need a lift?"

"I won’t be going." Jo accepts the lit cigarette and inhales the smoke. Eyes closed, face smoothing out. "Disqualified."

"A shame."

"That’s a word," Jo says.

"What did you do?"

"Failed the piss test. Bastou," he tilts his head to the direction the car took a minute ago, "needed a clean sample. Swapped with him after the weigh-ins."

Nicolò contemplates on that. "So your time table is clear."

Jo gives him The Face. His eyebrows are very expressive.

"There might be a place to get some loose cash," Nicolò says to Jo's great amusement, "tip money, you understand? This bare-knuckle circus in Dugny."

"In Dugny," Jo says.

There is a patrol car cruising at a pace one might call suspicious, so Nicolò moves in front of him to form a makeshift shield. Jo says nothing, staying put. Nicolò is sure Jo knows the action to be unnecessary but muscle reflexes developed in one’s salad years tend to stick for a lifetime.

"If you vouch for their purse," Jo says at last.

His sweat-shiny hair is of deep ink and coarse summer fuzz, reminding Nicolò of before-and-after Meera oil ads. The afternoon brightness doesn’t flatter his bruised face. In a way, Jo feels like solace.

Sudden resurfacing of memory gives Nicolò a pause. "What about your holy month?" This prompts Jo to hold out a long, stoic silence until Nicolò nods. "All right. Fifty-fifty?"

"Sixty-forty."

Jo laughs. "Fuck off."

He turns to leave with his gym bag still weighing down his shoulder and Nicolò knows this one is not for haggling.

"Fine, fifty-fifty."

Jo is watching the idle motion of his trainers on the pavement. "We use your van. You’re not making me fucking commute."

"Sure. Aid is on you."

They don’t conclude the deal with a shake of hands but Nicolò feels the closure of their little contract in the way Jo unfolds his back and opens his face a fraction.

"We can talk details at mine," Jo says. "Unless you’re on schedule."

Nicolò would like to smile, properly. And then he feels it form on the slow drive to the other side, while Jo seems to exist in half dose. Nicolò silences the stereo.

This time the claustrophobic heat of his head is less violent.

* * *

It must be the parched French afternoons that get him so restless.

Seven years of sliding in and out of this country haven’t mellowed out his tolerance, neither for the language which he has to speak to do shit done, nor for the—he winces—views.

As they near the spot, Nicolò notices that the anxious jerk of Jo’s knee hasn’t subsided. He’s sweating in his vintage Adidas nylons but it keeps him focused, he says, in his body rather than stuck in brain-sands.

The crowd looks mellower than the few times Nicolò witnessed it before, with only a handful of Caïds scattered around, a lot of mild hitters and local distributors—and there’s Hassan whom Jo knows from their shared criminal adolescence and whom he hasn’t seen since another life, or so Jo informs Nicolò once the engine is cut and they simply observe the surrounding energy.

The energy is—passable. He is sure of Jo’s success though the nature of such surety is concerning.

"Which one is Hassan’s?" Jo asks, crinkling with his silly jacket.

"I don’t know."

Jo rarely fidgets but he does get animated as far as his careful control allows.

Now he is dragging the jacket’s zipper in a pantomime of plucking at some obscure instrument, his rings catching on the ridges. Must have slipped his mind to leave them at home.

Nicolò takes a measured breath before unlocking the door. "Stay in the car. I will come for you."

Jo remains silent but abandons the zipper. Meeting his eyes is like peering through dark glass. He is not here.

But Hassan’s boy is very much present, though the name has escaped Nicolò in the clamour of the small crowd, with the betters posturing and fighters going through vulgar warm-ups.

Hassan tells him of the recent job they pulled on some slots (they better hope those weren’t the barretto slots, though bragging of one’s successful raids on Camorra's rivals to a Camorra is rather clever of him) as they watch his boy cut circles around the small clearing in front of the lone building. The structure resembles early century hospitals, something out of a war film. Aproned nurses in novice veils live here.

"So where do you keep him?" Hassan asks.

"Keep?" Nicolò isn’t sure of the meaning. "I don’t keep anything."

"Even money? Good for me, then."

Nicolò claps his shoulder as is the custom and goes for the few present Montreuil hustlers to sort out the bet. They pay him little mind but tell him to drag his man out for the coin toss.

Back in the van, Jo has shed his jacket and is tugging at the threadbare edge of his undershirt. Nicolò watches him peel it off his damp body and violently shake his head in a rather odd display of physicality.

One of his rings gets stuck as he passes both hands through his curls. Some unnatural impulse forces Nicolò to reach and help. The hair is not soft but his skin finds it pleasant as he untangles the ring and waits for Jo to drop the jewellery into Nicolò’s offered palm.

"Listen to me," Nicolò says and comes up empty. Something about him today. 

"Keep going," Jo says. "Sounds fascinating so far." 

Nicolò sighs. "I am not watching, okay? It’s not for me."

"And?"

Nicolò has no idea. "Good luck."

With that Jo nods, rinses his mouth with overpriced water someone’s forgotten in the van—too warm judging by his irked expression—and spits in a way Nicolò should find distasteful but somehow doesn’t.

As Jo disappears in that murder of crows drenched in testosterone, Nicolò sprawls behind the wheel. The oppressive air is slowly returning to his head and then his lungs.

"Porca puttana, Nico," he tells the windscreen dust, letting the fighting blink in and out of his periphery.

The first three bouts rotate the boys out fast, though all he sees is dust escaping the spectator circle.

Soon it’s Jo’s first go according to the toss—and Nicolò stops keeping track after that, settling for a smoke and a non-prayer.

Seven years of silence rusts the skill.

Sister Benedetta would chastise him and warm his shoulder with a palm, coarse as laundered linen.

 _The desire to pray_ , she’d say, and the naturally soft layers of her voice would cloak Nicolò’s shaved lice-free head in a sensation so strange and pleasant he would forever chase its replications and find the world wanting, _the desire to pray_ , she'd say, _is a type of prayer in itself_.

Was it last week that Jo told him of intent or have ages passed?

Time has been escaping him. But on that afternoon Nicolò passed him the cold espresso and said, "You wake up late." 

"It’s my day off," Jo accepted the cup with a soft supplication Nicolò had not heard before.

Had it been so long since his last encounter with curiosity that he’d forgotten how to care for it without inflicting damage? And Lelio hadn’t been that, not all that. 

So Nicolò said: "And what about your prayers?"

Jo held him still with a look. "What about yours?"

What about mine, he thought. Mine are void. Mine have as much to do with reality as I do, as does my body, or the shapeless thing trapped immobile in the hollow of my mind. Mine are not yours for all I have is dirt and you are clean, my lines are clumsy where yours are water, and all the debts I owe should not be yours to share.

"Do you remember how?" Nicolò asked instead, stupidly.

"You don’t forget."

"So why not… do it and be good?"

Jo’s laugh rang soft on that day, in that kitchen.

"I can’t recite, Nicky," Jo replied, turning away, "if my heart is wayward. I can’t be hollow with my words. And I won’t be an agent of absence."

Over the tree crowns, the change of light draws Nicolò back to the fighting. 

"Water," Jo says, leaning through the passenger window.

Nicolò does not startle but somehow his mind has blocked out the approach. Jo is unbruised but breathless, his body lathery with a tired glow as if he’s galloped it into foam.

"How many left?" Nicolò passes him the bottle.

"Two. The Albanian and one of the Caïds boys. Then me."

"No Hassan?"

Jo inclines his head and douses it with water, shaking out his hair with delight. Loose droplets pepper Nicolò’s numb face as he takes in the peculiar sound Jo makes.

"Did you two reconnect?"

Jo huffs, amused, and tosses the bottle in the back. "Hassan’s idea of connection is talking cars and pussy."

"And you are not—a car guy."

"I am not," Jo combs through his hair and looks away, maybe to observe the fight. "And the women I’m with will be of no interest to him."

"So you’re too good for him now."

"No." At that Jo meets his eye, almost appearing stern. "It’s not about me at all."

One of the dealers whistles Jo into the fold and Nicolò watches his passage with a surge of fascination; the generous touch of guarded men, their eager hands on the expanse of his bare back, the low bend of his neck.

Jo assumes the neutral stance at the edge of the dirt patch, unmovable and solid but only at a glance.

Nicolò knows him to be light on his feet and fast in his reach for the kick despite Jo's insistence to project as a boxer-puncher with first-timers.

The difference between the motions remains obscure to Nicolò but he knows Jo to favour knee and elbow strikes, and that he rarely sweeps.

The heels of Jo’s bare feet scrape at the dust, shifting the stance in minute ways Nicolò is yet to learn.

The Caïds bookie throws an arm between Jo and the Caïds boy, leaping back like a flea to escape the onslaught—but Jo only shifts in place across from the kid who appears to be wary of making the first move.

Some of the jeers thrown in the crowd reach Nicolò’s bubble already fragmented, something about dancing and wankage and always fica, fica, fica, fica…

The kid sweeps in, too slow and too open, and gets his trial one-two countered until he is being pushed back to the edge and slightly past it, with the crowd parting for safety.

Jo does something with the sharp incline of his knee that bleeds into a series of jabs and a comma of a kick. All too-quick to fully register but it leaves Nicolò with vague impressions of a thigh expanding under the grey fabric of workout clothes and a bare foot grazing its crescent over a cheekbone. 

They repeat a few variations of the same not-quite chase and Nicolò catches his attention drifting, tucking itself in the crook of Jo’s knee, between his shoulder blades, in the dip at the centre of his loud chest.

Jo is not a car guy, but Lelio was one.

And Lelio being one led Nicolò to the anxiety of bordering himself away until he couldn’t anymore, until one particular implosion ended in a fire to end a dozen of bridges. Lelio and him had only a timber arch to share.

Suppose it’s been a while since Nicolò called up Céline.

It’s on the looping memory of Céline's lush thighs that Nicolò is jerked back to the present by the clashing power of two bodies—the kid going down hard and Jo, still strung to their shared frequency of combat, following.

It's a hold, Jo trapping him in the dust with the efficiency of a campagna cook laying out overfed poultry for decapitation.

Dark glass comes to mind, the burnish of everything that was Jo only hours back. The kid hasn’t stood a chance.

The are no rules here except avoid murder if possible, but Jo catches himself before he could inflict anything more on the poor guy and shifts his thighs.

Somehow Nicolò knows that Jo doesn’t do senseless nor engages with feral behaviours. How strange it is to see a fighter free of aggression. Instead there is too much acumen, too much humane manoeuvring.

Jo is astride the fighter’s chest and shoulders, unmoving yet noticeably strained with the effort of maintaining a chokehold.

A beat passes, and the kid taps at Jo’s thigh.

Something appears to come undone in Jo’s frame, a de-twisting, a putting-to-earth.

His energy is once more deeply grounded as he sags with a heavy rhythm to his chest. Then regains enough balance to stand and help the kid to his feet.

Nicolò needs to climb out and perform more clapping of backs in exchange for their honestly-won cash, but not waiting for Jo’s return seems… uncivil.

So he waits.

"Water," Jo tells him, climbing into the passenger seat and leaning his forehead on the fur-lined dashboard.

He ignores the bottle and Nicolò just sits there, holding it out like an idiot. 

Jo cranes his neck to squint at him through one very tired eye. "You getting our snatch or what?"

Nicolò throws the bottle at his still sweaty midriff and sets off to get their very snatch. "You speak words but I don’t understand this language."

Jo laughs through the hitch of his exhausted lungs. "Cocò, this language is the only one you understand."

"As you say."

Jo says nothing more but straightens in the seat to let himself breathe through the adrenaline comedowns.

When Nicolò returns one oily grand richer, Jo has somehow tugged the vintage Adidas over his naked body and found Nicolò’s Italian smokes, cheap by design. Connects one firmer to childhood, refines the nostalgia.

Nicolò starts the car and counts out three bills, two by two and one a full hundred.

"Here," Nicolò says and restrains from dropping the cash into Jo’s lap. "Next time… could be more, could be less. Up for it?"

The money disappears into Jo’s breast pocket. Nicolò can still see his delicate chest tattoo in the open delta of the jacket.

"Let’s go home," Jo says.

The drive back is wordless and quietly jubilant with Sexion d'Assaut blasting on the stereo at the behest of a gently pleased Jo whose post-bout behaviour reminds Nicolò of a sea-spray puddle.

He remembers about the jewellery only at the entrance to Jo’s building and is surprised to find Jo seems to have blanked the fact entirely.

His palm doesn’t linger over Jo’s when he returns the rings. Driving to Céline’s Courbevoie flat, he imagines the dwelling warmth there and wonders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sponsored by: [exits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6YMCjpfH0c) by foals


	2. septembre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusuf deals with grief in questionable ways. Nicolò makes a decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **chapter cw:** references to background character death, mild injury sustained in a fight but no graphic description of the fighting, recreational drug use.

The woman in the painting is placid, the invitation in her face subtle as is becoming of a Comtesse. Yusuf is tired of seeing her so incomplete.

No dignity in that. No dignity in his hands.

She is Largillière’s and she is waiting for him to get it together. He craves to be of aid but his bruised hands are too stiff after last weekend bout and he wouldn’t be able to hold chopsticks straight let alone clean the soft oval of her face with solvent.

The deadline is flexible but this is far from the point. He’s struggled to grasp for one since yesterday.

The call had come late that afternoon, and it took Yusuf too long to place the voice and its origin but he refused to accept the cold coal of guilt at the fact.

Until Hafsia cut through more than one distance with a simple word, a name.

And then she cut the only thread he had made a point to keep safe and close to his hands, always, just within reach— _your grandmother, Yusuf_ —she said, a tender killing from the heart, _aathama Allahu ajrakom_ , from the one who knows and extends her understanding

“I understand,” was the first thing he said to the news and her mild comfort.

Hafsia had always spoken in gentle measures and she did so then.

“I understand,” Yusuf told her again. “And when…?"

“This morning,” Hafsia said and hushed someone beside her. He had chosen not to know of her marriage or children.

"And what of ghusl?"

“My mother cared for her. Wouldn't let him."

"She deserved better than his hands."

Hafsia seemed taken aback. "Yusuf, permissible or not, he wouldn't dare condemn her like this. You must know that.”

Yusuf knew and deeply disliked the knowledge.

She shared her quiet prayer with him in a private imitation of aaza. It felt too long, probably cost a fortune too.

“Thank you, Hafsia.”

“Yusuf,” there was unusual hesitancy in her voice. “What lives in you cannot die."

He hummed. “Sure it can. You’ve seen it before.”

“It cannot die,” she insisted. 

Maybe it was meant to aid him. As if she sensed his acute sickness, the chronic condition of non-belonging.

Or maybe she meant to remove the acquired French in him or at least make it secondary for the moment.

“What's in your head, azizi?”

“I’m not so sure,” he said but thought of murder. 

The passing of mwie and therefore the rigor of him, frozen forever in a single moment of September daylight, unlawfully embalmed in one honey-sweet instant of time, like an amber fossil; Yusuf the kahruba.

There he touched the last memory of mwie and her hands in his, in the empty house of no windows or doors but full of peace. 

And then he indulged in one somewhere in the middle: of her building shelter from the only cloth she could afford—her touch—to shield his soft sides from the fire of his father’s words.

“I thought of him as the dead one,” Yusuf continued. “Or I tried to. But you see—how could I wish that on a parent? How could anyone think like that? Of their family? Of their children?”

“When home is not safe anymore.”

“Was I ever unsafe? Would you have told me?”

“You did the best you could. You were safe."

He looked at his free hand and its too-still fingers. “I wear his ring. Every day I put it on, I polish the silver the moment it begins to darken. Every day he stays unburied. Free. In her care. That absurd man—too late for tarbiyyah, don't you find? She should be the one cared for."

“Oh, Yusuf.” 

His eyes closed against the smarting light.

Hafsia spoke in a whisper then. “I have to go, Yusuf.”

He nodded to himself. “Thank you. I know you had no obligation to me. So thank you.” Then, just to make her smile, “Sweet Hafsia, giver of worlds.”

She gave him a soft laugh instead. “You’ve meant so much to her. And to me.”

“Once.”

“Once,” she confirmed.

“Barakallahu feeki, Hafsia.”

“Wa feeka.” She hesitated once more. “She was glad for who you came to be, always."

Mwie was generous, true, but how could he take this gladness of hers second-hand, when she was already in the ground and he so cowardly, so loathsome—the finality of her would not sink in until well into the night when something strikingly arctic would descend upon him; the sun’s burial.

"She deserved better than me or him."

"She didn't think this way. Yusuf is mercy and tenderness—her words. Gentleness adorns him. Do not prey upon him, she'd tell anyone who dared." Hafsia's voice could barely be heard. "Peace be with you, Yusuf."

The night brought the tremors together with Sebastien who staggered through the dark of the flat fumbling for a switch. He must’ve held the spare keys in the same hand because the sharp pain in Yusuf’s left ear echoed the irritating jiggle of metal.

"Man, why you still up?" Bastou squinted, then frowned. "Yusuf, you're looking a bit raw."

"Turn off the light," Yusuf covered his eyes against the artificial glare.

Sebastien complied without question and cruised directly to the sofa.

"What's wrong?" he mumbled against the cushion, half-asleep.

"Ask me tomorrow."

Yusuf saw the moment his brother's brain blacked out and wished it for himself.

Now he is spending his sleep-deprived afternoon in the empty studio, sitting in front of the Comtesse propped not far from the hot table, his bandaged hands shaking from the lack of sun in his heart and for the lack of anything to hold or connect with.

A scraper, a brush, a touch of human skin.

Better if it’s the bow of a neck or the soft spot behind an ear.

Option one?

Nile isn’t in today, but Sophie being absent is much worse. It robs him of a chance to shoot the shit about wax removal or hook up in a storage room as a temporary solution for his soul-lack.

Option two?

He could drag Bastou for a moderate pub crawl meant to address milder crises or he could check with Nile on the subject of their urban cemetery project.

It would be nice to see if they could camp out in Bagnolet to rekindle the creative impulse sparked half a decade ago when he wasn’t himself or wasn’t at all.

Is there an option three?

The idea of Nile and her vacillating energies which tend to bloom particularly morbid in the last burst of autumnal serotonin—they are sure to drive them both out of Paris and into the quaint folds of the polluted countryside.

What of option four?

His fridge still wears the number of the grande école prick from May with whom he’s only met up twice since. Both encounters more a sick accident than a lucky turn of fate as evidenced by their culmination with Yusuf wall-fucking the future health minister in various states of annoyance.

But he doesn’t feel like going home or being polite with the rich or simply being.

So Yusuf stares at his phone for one long anxious stretch and then texts Nicky.

They meet in the car park south of Valenton with the casual air of old acquaintances who just happened to cross paths on an aimless promenade round a depot.

Today Nicky matches the weather in colour and his soft hair is long enough to curl unfashionably behind his silver-heavy ears.

Yusuf shrugs away the nonchalant question about the absence of his gym bag where he keeps the boxing tape and aid kit assortment because he can’t read the sincerity of the question through Nicky’s casual veneer.

 _Cocò,_ he thinks in tired reproach instead of voicing it. There is no need for his voice to exist in this space, not now. _Nico, Lino, vert de Mer_. Cocò for Sicily and not the little Ko Ko Ri Ko nazi sympathiser, though Nicolò follows her by defying style in his own little corner.

They drive to the underscore of windscreen wipers and someone’s clumsy attempts at a mixtape until the rain stops and the outer crown of southern Paris ends.

All is awash with low angle sunlight when the van climbs over a railway crossing and fails to fit in a lot behind a cluster of old textile factory barracks.

Water bottle in hand and head abuzz with nothing at all, Yusuf watches Nicky exchange back slaps with the resident pool holders.

The crowd looks more disparate than the one in Dugny. Rougher, less contained. Maybe he should’ve made the detour to the flat to grab the bag but the thought skims over without catching.

“Eight large,” Nicky confirms the bank, fingers propped on the passenger’s window frame and tucked under his stubbled chin. “Try not to get murdered out there.”

“Ya, habibi,” Yusuf says over the last gulps of water. He counts the fighters, half of them already naked from the waist up despite the September chill, and divides. “When was the last time one grand felt like any real money to you.”

He can’t read the look Nicky gives him.

No matter. None of it matters.

He straightens for a warm-up around the van, ditching the jacket and leaving on the paint-smudged marcel he's probably owned since the turn of the century.

When the time comes, he is warm and half-empty. This pursuit is so different from the nature of conservation, both in the taste with which it floods his dry mouth and the numb afterglow of accomplishment.

The end goal is to not be. And the ruin gets you there faster than the week-long needling of restoring a face, or a piece of trite sur le motif, or a sorry handful of things plucked dead.

When the time comes, he is free to dive in and let the extremes pass through him.

Few things come closer to a sense of belonging that this, where it feels like submergence and, at the same time, sickeningly hyperreal.

It is holding nothing and everything at once. He knows there is no way he is losing today.

* * *

There is this new thing.

It slowly came to life when Nicolò dislodged the bleeding sack of bones and bruised muscle that had become of Jo with a warning not to stain the cheap seat upholstery out of pure habit.

Nicolò can’t name what the new thing is but it has balled itself in his stomach with intent to keep on expanding.

What a day, Nicolò thinks, and sets to ignore the stomach-dwelling thing. He counts the winnings into a bag with Issa still hovering over him in a display of misguided precaution.

Jo doesn’t move from the painful curl his body has assumed in the corner of the seat when Nicolò is back. There’s nothing to do but shove the bag out of sight and try to remember the way back to the autoroute.

Every tricky patch of the unpaved road jolts a groan out of Jo, though soon he’s got no energy to spare for any noise.

An aid kit which they don’t have won’t cut it this time, this is more of a detailed medical care situation.

Nicolò knows better than to offer a visit to a clinic, rural or metro, and racks his list of safe contacts for any qualified blood men or ex-nurses.

"Ehi, Amir Khan," he says, noticing the sudden quiet, "keep it together." He clicks in front of Jo’s battered face and raises his voice a notch. "You can’t sleep. Do you know someone who can look at you?"

Another five minutes is spent on coaxing out an address and convincing Jo to drink some goddamn water that evolves into a short bathing session on the roadside.

Jo is precariously leaning from the front seat—his peeling knuckles pale with the effort of holding his body halfway out of the van—and Nicolò pours water over his face and hair.

He is somewhat proud of his attempt to inflict little pressure with his other hand as he rinses away the blood. The brow is cut and needs a butterfly or two. It’ll probably scar. Jo’s left cheekbone is a horror show, the eye forced shut by the swelling.

Jo curses only once. He is in danger of keeling over, but Nicolò steps between his spread thighs and lifts the bottle to Jo’s lips. Nicolò holds the air under his jaw instead of touching skin.

Feeding water into Jo's pained mouth without choking him proves to be a challenge but there is no way for him to leave this man a mess.

So he wipes Jo's face and neck with his handkerchief, and the silk comes away pink.

By the time they cross the city line, the day has bled into dreary twilight obscured by the concrete colony of slumlord suburbia. Their destination is a building that stretches and angles through half a bloc.

Jo makes no other sound until they are ushered inside the flat by a tall woman in a hastily wrapped summer robe who only clicks her tongue.

The place is large but reminds him of catacombs in its cramped intricate narrowness.

He is led to a tiled kitchen that nearly blinds him with its whiteness. The clinical air and chlorine smell remind him of old well-scrubbed hospitals in A Særa.

"What happened?"

The question is not directed at him, Nicolò realises, watching another woman—this one not white but thankfully fully-dressed—rise from the table and repeat the words to Jo who, in turn, sticks to his resolute silence.

"A fight," Nicolò answers.

The woman spares him a glance but says nothing else, guiding her patient to the chair and yelling for someone called Lykon to bring the good kit from the wardrobe, the one in the boudoir.

Boudoir, Nicolò wonders. 

They both see Jo flinch at the loud sound, and the woman frowns at her uncharacteristic lack of professionalism.

The man who must be Lykon is there half a minute later with a bag in hand. Shining with sex-sweat still, he seems to care little for his nudity as he plops the bag on the table.

"I thought the Arena season was over," Lykon says.

"Ask him," the woman gestures at Nicolò while snapping on a pair of surgical gloves. "What’d you get him into?"

"It was his choice."

The woman nods and sets to examine Jo’s pupil response with her fingers, then a penlight. She goes through a string of required exercises, so it’s likely she is an actual medical professional. 

"I can’t see anything major," she finally says, thoughtful. "I’d still like to do a CT, though. Screen your ribs too, just in case." The woman sighs at Jo’s absent hum. "I can get you tomorrow afternoon." Jo gives her a long look, and the woman warms him with a soft smile. "Jojo, let’s not do this. You’re going."

There is no response, but it looks like nobody is expecting one. Lykon and the woman proceed to have a silent conversation with their eyebrows until Lykon proclaims smoke time and leaves them with the patient.

The woman focuses on Nicolò. "Did you give him anything? Blood-thinners, alcohol?"

"No. He, well. He took amphetamine before the fight."

"He what?" She gives Jo a surprised look. "How long ago and how much?"

Nicolò tells her and lets her work in peace. Good smoker’s manners push him on a quest to discover the balcony in this loyer modéré maze. He suspects this dizzying space to be the result of at least three flats merged into one.

Turns out they don’t have a balcony, they have a fucking loggia, with a bite-sized garden and vintage windows. It robs Nicolò of belonging in this warm, kind space.

Lykon slots himself in the narrow stretch of the only open window. "What did Quynh say?"

"Not much."

"What do you say, then?"

"Jo needed the money."

Lykon holds a lighter to the end of Nicolò’s cigarette. "So how long has this been going on?"

He nods his thanks and inhales the smoke. "Why?"

"I mean, his regular stints leave him battered sometimes, sure. But this, today, is something else."

"Today he won a lot of money."

"And yet, you’ve never seen him this bad before."

"No."

And Nicolò has spotted the signs as soon as he set eyes on Jo and knew that any decent person would tell Jo to drop it and take a rest for he was in no mind to play power games, but Nicolò saved the decency for local civvies and children—and not just every loud bratty-mouthed offspring, to be honest—and there was the question of seeing a mess of a person and depriving them of the mess said person needs to see done in the absence of better alternatives.

So Nicolò counts his deliberate oversight of Jo’s mental looping as charity and not neglect.

Lykon studies him for a moment. "If there ever were a sign for it to stop, this is it, don’t you think?"

Nicolò shrugs and says no more of it.

He’s not Jo’s keeper or spiritual counsellor or hand-holding hair braiding beneficiary. Or friend. Is he? He hasn’t been operating within such interpersonal categories… maybe ever.

Friends, and that’s proper friends—not the family’s French operation or runners or partners or hookups—friends imply ties that are too flexible and not flexible enough, too defined and too demanding, obvious for some but, for him, impossible to navigate with certainty. Too much room for error which he can’t afford. He doesn’t fucking fumble.

"I better check on them," Lykon says and doesn’t move, so Nicolò goes instead.

"No," Jo is saying when he’s within earshot, "I know you don't see it like that but I do."

"You know it’s no trouble," the woman called Quynh replies, looking at the tall woman for help.

Jo shakes his head and stares at his hands.

The tall woman has changed into flannels and the look on her face is grim but the severity of it comes from determination rather than anger. There is steel in her that’s absent in the other two, and the strength of her care speaks of safety and strictness but it isn’t motherly at all.

"It’s fine if you can't be here," she says, calm, "but at least let me drive you home."

"Not there."

"The Freeman girl then."

It’s obvious Jo doesn’t want his Institute posse to know and worry or judge.

Nicolò is surprised to find he can understand this in him now, though it comes not from the professional ability to read the motions of body and face but from the newly attained knowledge of the way Jo flows.

Not exactly the skill he was aware of until now. Well, not consciously.

Watching the woman and Quynh crash through Jo’s stoic silence and sternly press him into calling one of his Institute friends turns tedious pretty fast, and with the mention of Le Livre’s name all of Nicolò’s patience escapes like the dying breath of warm cola fizz.

"I’ll drive him," he interjects.

The tall woman regards him with suspicion he’s long learned to let slide. It means nothing. It should mean nothing. It should be irrelevant.

"And you are?" she asks.

"Someone who can drive him."

"And your name?"

"Andy," Jo says. He is on the verge of passing out.

Andy presses one hand to Jo’s shoulder. "I need to know what you’re planning on doing."

"I," Nicolò raises his eyebrows, "plan to drive him. He can sleep at mine."

"And where _is_ yours?"

"Adia," Jo again.

"None of your business," says Nicolò to Andy or Adia.

"He is my business."

"Adia," Jo tries.

"He appears to be my business too," Nicolò says and doesn’t know where it’s all coming from all of a sudden. "We work together."

"Andy, it’s fine." Jo makes an attempt to stand upright but needs the joint help of Quynh and Nicolò to keep any sort of balance. "I’ll call you when we get there."

As soon as they arrange Jo’s limbs in the passenger seat again, Quynh catches the side of his jacket’s sleeve with two careful fingers.

"I still have to arrange some supplies for him. Come up?"

Nicolò follows her back and waits in the cramped hallway. There is an old meter mounted high up on the wall by the door with three-decade-old wallpaper shaped around it in what seemed to be a quick and cheap job.

"So how do you know him?"

He doesn’t exactly startle but Andy’s voice still sways something unpleasantly in his stomach.

"We know the same people."

"Who?"

"Le Livre."

"Ah," Andy relaxes, "so you’re one of those ghosts from the past."

"Maybe for Le Livre. Jo and I, we have an understanding."

"Your kind of understanding will see him dead."

"Doesn’t look like he’s getting any other kind at the moment."

She and her odd roommate specimens may care very much and bleed restrained love and acceptance but the difference between knowing affection and being deeply understood in the blackout moments such as these is essential for someone like Jo. Someone like Nicolò, too, if he chose to be vulnerable.

"He didn’t want to come," Nicolò tells her. "He doesn’t like to be misunderstood when he is like this, yes?"

His words don't cause offence but she says something under her breath, quiet and tired.

After a beat or two, she regards him with new interest. "You have a name?"

He tells her and learns that she is Andromache and that she’s known Yusuf longer than most with the exception of her roommates and Le Livre and now maybe Nicolò himself, so she expects him to keep her updated on the recovery status until Jo can do so himself without dropping the phone or throwing up from the IPS brightness.

The truth is, he can’t deny this woman. She seems to mirror the very structure of his own workings, down to the framework and the long-solidified centre.

Except hers also guards the warmth and something so gracious and humane that Nicolò feels sore in his inadequacy for the first time in years, maybe since leaving Sister Benedetta and her severe patience.

"There you go," says Quynh, appearing disturbingly out of nowhere, and passes him a small cosmetics bag. "There's enough for the morning change."

Nicolò takes a peek and spies some analgesics amid the neat rolls of compression bandages and sterile gauze and tiny plastic bottles with impossible child protection locks.

"There is a chance he’s sustained mild rib contusion, so he’ll need help moving around. Don’t worry about the laceration on his right side, it’s worse than it looks. It’ll scar though. The eyebrow as well, but there shouldn't be a problem as long as he keeps the cuts clean. He should be careful with the stitches on his cheek but he knows the routine…" Quynh touches his shoulder. "He can sleep now so just let him. I’ll text him the time of the appointment. Will you be able to drive him tomorrow?"

This crowd is just so damn good. Nothing but profoundly disturbing.

Nicolò nods on his way out and pretends not to hear the sincerity of Quynh’s voice when he thanks him. The discomfort doesn’t ebb away at all.

* * *

The half-hour spent in the clinic parking lot has felt more like a walk-in freezer vacation. He really needs more meat on his bones because it’s extremely fucking un-mild for late September.

“Feel free to fuck off for the meantime,” Jo told him before heaving his still bruised but now fully operational hunk of a body out of the van. “I’m sure you got calls to make, flies to fuck.”

“I’m sure I have,” Nicolò replied and stayed put to do some bookkeeping.

The clinic is in Bondy because of course Jo’s friends give back to the fucking community and its underfunded la Santé not-exactly-fringe hospitals. From what he’s gathered, Quynh is not a general practitioner nor is she of any neurology-adjacent occupation.

Not that it would matter since Jo’s Vitale seems to be an issue, on the account of some shady bureaucratic fuckery no doubt—again, none of which matters because Nicolò is a glorified cabbie as of this week.

He shouldn’t feel debased for such assignations and so he doesn’t. No skin off his rump there. Shit, he got paid four grand for wiping some blood off Jo and re-learning to talk to normal people but otherwise doing fuck all.

There is no time to be bored, though, he’s got calls to make, flies to fuck.

So he checks with the new kid on the recent situation with the Aix suppliers and then takes a call from a newly recruited croupier—a wisp of a girl from one of the game rooms in the H territory—who communicates in overly complicated code to relay the inside info which he carefully jots down in consecutive shorthand.

Then he thinks of the week Jo spent refusing painkillers in his rental and knows he won’t be able to weather another. And because Nicolò stupidly doesn’t carry medicinal-grade weed and Jo's all out of hash, it leaves one option.

The number’s in his phonebook, sure, but there is this thing about bridges. Some are more to do with fire rather than water.

“Cocò,” Lelio greets him after the first ring.

“Lelio.”

The silence is long enough for Nicolò to discover his body can still sometimes squirm.

“So tell me,” Lelio is never perturbed or loud, but the guttural rasp of his new voice is something else entirely, “is this Cesare’s attempt at a team-building exercise?”

“More of a personal initiative. If you’re up for it.”

“Always am. Are you?”

He remembers the acrid taste of their last meeting. It took days to bleach the dizziness of carbon monoxide out of his nose and mouth.

The time between then and now feels abrasive. Long enough to abandon the forefront of his mind, too recent to let his nights go undisturbed. No sense in hiding anymore, he supposes.

“Apparently,” he says.

They take a long road to make a deal for half a pack of something more medicinal in effect, and then Lelio tells him the rate has gone up.

“How about a worker’s discount?”

“Aren’t you on sabbatical?”

“That was summer.”

“Which one?”

No reproach in that, no accusation, but the back of his throat itches from phantom smoke all the same.

The memory of it is thick and nasty and mazut-sour. And the feeling, the feeling is nothing more than a shade, his body spotless. It’s no good to compare.

So Nicolò snaps, a little. “Just say what you wanna say.”

“What, you’re not doing this face to face?”

Nicolò closes his eyes for the count of five. Imagines himself in Lelio’s place, faceless. As if drawn by his impatience, Jo chooses to finally descend the steps.

In the absence of Nicolò’s enthusiasm, a rather fragile orderly helps Jo into the passenger seat even though Jo clearly doesn’t need it anymore. Jo thanks him with a two-fingered salute and, as soon as the man is gone, lights a cigarette. His fingers are shaking.

“Sure, let’s do face to face,” Nicolò tells Lelio, a moment too late, and re-starts the engine. The stereo hiccups. “If you actually mean it.”

He meets Jo’s eyes that look almost present. His general energy is more cinematic grime now than a traffic accident from a week prior.

Nicolò wonders at this new attentiveness of his. Then again, he should be attentive when it comes to investing in his assets, shouldn't he?

“I mean it,” says Lelio. “None of these dog fuckers can appreciate the good stuff. So come over and get yours now.”

Nicolò hangs up with a promise to text upon arrival and asks Jo about the check-up.

Jo sighs. “I’ll live.”

Nicolò takes the nonchalance for the Tipp-Ex of desperation that it is. “Stay another night.”

“I’m sure Nile won’t mind me leeching off her for a week.”

“She won’t. You can start tomorrow.”

With that, the discussion is over and they exchange no more words on the way to the eastern storage point where Lelio is waiting by the curb, bag of green in hand for the world to see.

Nicolò curses and ignores Jo’s amused teasing. The five steps it takes him to cross from the van to Lelio feel monumental.

“Che cazzo, Nico, where'd you find this one?” Lelio asks him, probably eyeing Jo through his sunglasses.

His words would flow the same, Nicolò could imagine it so clearly, if not for the rasp of the damaged throat and the cheetah-print face mask distorting the voice.

“Why don’t you roll the coke out and your semi-automatic while you’re at it?” Nico hisses in his face, then takes a spooked step away.

“I would but it seems you’re busy these days.” Lelio accepts the cash, then opens one side of Nicolò’s jacket and presses the bag under it with Nicolò’s wind-bitten palm. “I see your pool for outsourcing changed. I remember you being less interested in the colonies.”

“Yes,” Nicolò readjusts the package, “and I remember you fucking up so bad you got shelved with the schoolchildren.”

“So this is it?”

Nicolò has to look away. “I am sorry, Lelio. But I don’t understand what it was about me that made you…” He waves at himself, “I didn’t do anything to you.”

“Knowing was enough.”

Something inside Nicolò squirms. “I don't understand you.”

Lelio’s tinted lenses seem to bore into him in place of his lighter eyes. “You still seeing that Occitan? Céline? Thought so. Ever noticed it was only 'her or nobody'?”

“I’m not—what? I’m not into her, holy shit, Lelio. I barely know her.”

“Seven years, yes?” Lelio turns towards the entrance. “Nice chat, Nico. Stay out of trouble.”

Jo doesn’t ask any questions.

The silence persists through their rush-hour crawl home and through the climb to the fourteenth floor and even through Jo’s fussing with the bedsheets.

Until Nicolò can’t stand it and explodes on him, knowing Jo can only speak university Italian and won’t mind him cursing up a storm.

Eventually Nicolò exhausts all of it and feels pleasantly empty. His left hand throbs from meeting the wall amid one of his particularly active gesticulating passages.

In the new quiet, Jo seems to wait for something from his lazy sprawl on the bed, arm thrown over his head.

“That’s very unlike you,” Jo mumbles into his elbow. The overhead light must be too much so Nicolò switches it for the dim neon-red of the pier-glass.

“You don’t know me well.”

At that Jo lowers the arm from his face and turns on his side with a pained huff. His fingers tangle in the grimy curls over one temple. The hair needs a wash. Nicolò finds he isn't opposed to lending the products or doing it for him.

“Maybe not,” Jo says.

His good eye looks for something in Nicolò's expression. All objects seem to grow in appeal in a light like this, and Jo’s face is no different; for all its recent alterations it seems to capture attention.

There's nothing to be gained from looking but Nicolò looks anyway.

Jo probably knows how this type of red light works and why it flatters many human faces, but Nicolò doesn’t need to go all subatomic to accept the reactions that beautiful things unearth in him.

“Maybe not,” says Jo. “But I think I’m getting there. About time, don’t you think?”

Nicolò can’t exactly retort.

Before this summer, he knew inexplicable shit like Jo’s ability to dance, having fallen witness to one of Le Livre’s quiet anniversary binges at Silencio at which Jo, being off duty, got promptly picked up by some English girl that fancied herself a character in a Kieślowski flick.

He knew that Jo was open but cautious and didn’t let any shit deter him but remained closed off from his origins, something Nicolò himself hasn’t witnessed but knew through Le Livre.

Then still boyish Sebastien, a prematurely married sucker fresh from Marseille who’d helped Jo find his footing after juvie, who told him of Jo’s years before taule, Jo the runner, Jo the keeper of the books.

It explained Jo’s entirely nonplussed reaction to their first meeting when Le Livre had to be fished out of Nicolò’s maiden base of operations in Paris.

The before-Jo was less and more all at once.

The before-Jo did not mind when Nicolò and his handful of Napoli boys used Jo’s overstuffed council flat as a transit point. For a few weeks at least, until Le Livre got kicked from the Institute and Jo had to move to a calmer area.

When Nicolò asked why Jo had allowed him in all those years ago, Jo only shrugged and said, “You can take a boy out of the neuf-trois, but…”

Now he knows that where Jo stands for Joseph, Joseph stands for fuck all because, much like Nicky, it was devised to ward and belong and keep one’s boxes safe.

So yes, Nicolò is aware of some Jo-adjacent notions.

One of them is this: Le Livre turns up asking for the heavy-hitting shit only when he’s dead exhausted and hollow-boned, leading Jo after him because Jo is responsible for his brother.

Jo carts Bastou at his most maudlin through the cycles of sobriety and relapse, sidelining self-preservation for family.

He can see now that it goes beyond Sebsatien as well, witnessing Jo contain the daily hurt, his innards al contrario for nobody to see until he could shove it back in place on his own and re-emerge, pristine and welcoming.

Nicolò isn’t sure where the blame falls here: on a person or a collective or the general system of privilege reigning supreme in Jo’s trade.

Knowing Jo now means more cash on the side for both of them.

For Nicolò it also means having a place to take a rest when he can’t stomach Rino’s increasingly obtuse strategising. But should Jo dip any more of his toes back in the business, it may not matter how good he is.

Knowing Jo means he also knows that Jo has a couple of hours left before the mild muscle spasms kick in. A gutful of prontalgine won't do shit.

Either way, Jo has already begun to sweat. That’s why these words tumble out of Jo now, _it’s unlike you_ , _about time_ , and _don’t you think_.

“I think,” Nicolò replies, “that it’s time for some magic. After a good wash.”

“Manager, chauffeur, _and_ illusionist,” Jo drawls. “And there I was, wretched old Tawma, digits set to prod in my foolish belief of having seen the limits of your miracles and yet, signor, your magic hat goes deeper.”

Nicolò smiles and goes to get the tub ready. He leaves Jo in the bathroom with a pair of scissors for the bandages and an oversized red towel because he’s not letting this regular nose bleeder ruin his sea mint Ralph Laurens.

He’s finished grinding Lelio’s weed and is setting up the gravity bong when Jo drags his well-steamed body to the bed.

Starfished and naked, Jo allows Nicolò to help with new bandages. He only needs one now, for compression, and a couple of surgical band-aids for his side.

“When I mentioned a wash,” Nicolò says, hooking a safety pin to the compression bandage, “I didn’t mean ‘Use the last of my bathing salts.’ Try this shit again and I’ll chop off your thumbs into a fucking frittata.”

“You can’t cook. And you got a fortune out of my infirmity. And now that this source of income is out and it effectively killed my Insitute projects,” here Jo gives his fingers a soft wiggle, “let me luxuriate the fuck out of your charity.”

“You can do something else in the meantime.”

Nicolò examines his forays into nursing. Something stands out and it's the surprising artfulness in which the new scars deform Jo’s largest body tattoo, a rupture through a thing fully formed and vivid and kept out of sight.

For Nicolò, there is no regret or shame in this minor ugliness just as the way Jo’s nudity comes off as pragmatic rather than vulgar. He can’t know what Jo himself might think of it.

“Oh, Cocò, it all comes down to this.” He gestures with his hands again, and Nicolò thinks his nail beds need work. “Take them away and I’ve got nothing to give. And if there’s nothing to offer, well, I just can’t see the point.”

What is the point of _me_ then, thinks Nicolò against all that is screaming at him not to. What is the point of us sharing space now.

They fall into one of their soft silences as if seeking refuge on familiar ground. Nicolò can’t let them go back.

He clears his throat. “What happened that day, Jo?”

“Someone died.”

“Tell me,” he says after a moment of stewing in this red silence, this functional bareness of Jo’s body that’s been used as a tool in this country, by these people. And what of Nicolò?

“My family,” Jo closes his eyes. “In Morocco.”

“Who was your family?”

“My grandmother.”

“You didn’t go to the funeral?”

“Not possible. I was told on the day but after the burial.”

Nicolò wonders at his apathy. It is unsettling. “Don’t you want to go?”

“What for?”

Nicolò rubs at his chin. “To see home.”

Yusuf laughs, grimacing at the pull in his side. “Home?”

“Forgive me but—you don’t exactly act like this place accepts you as its child.”

“Nicolò, can you honestly tell me that you’ve got a place to call home?”

“In name, yes.” Nicolò shifts closer. “I think you want to go.”

Jo nods and touches his lips in thought. “I have… this terrible fear of it. The idea of the exalted return is as old as the country itself: smell the laundry of the shared courtyard, touch the land’s dirt that should feel like belonging, refind your bearings. Refind your family, refind yourself, bismillahi.”

“And your fear, it is of failure to do that?”

“It is of being unfit for it.” Jo smooths over his unreadable chest tattoo and begins tracing the outline with his ring finger. His rings are still by the sink. “Unfit to call it part of me. Unfit to be seen as kin. Completely rootless. In the wind.” 

Nicolò looks away from his chest. “The fault is not with you.”

“How would you know?”

“Where I grew up,” he has to shift away again, “blood family didn’t exist. I know nothing of mine. The woman who let me get away with too much, even though it was against her station, told me it was of no consequence. Her faith, and mine, let us accept us as the… starting points. Of our worlds. And build families of our own.”

“Do you have one?”

“Not as such. But Jo, I bring this up because… I know that you are expected to centre your life around your blood. And for you to not do so, it tells me the fault lies elsewhere.”

“You also know that I’m not very good at faith.”

“You know me to be bad at it as well, but just as I had another world in me once, so did you. What happened to make you so alone in this?”

Jo stretches one foot out, hooking over Nicolò’s lap. “It wasn’t what happened but what had been happening. What simply existed.” His sigh is a pleased one when Nicolò touches his ankle. “I barely did. I think I used to exist more, when my mother was alive. But I can’t remember for certain.” Then he pulls away. “I don’t like using people to define myself. I prefer not to.”

“It’s human. I define you by how you relate to me. You do the same.”

“Human ability for empathy is disappointing.”

Nicolò laughs. “I wouldn’t say that. You are doing just fine. But we only know what we are, if even that. We only know what we perceive.” 

“Oh, but how you perceive me isn’t exactly me as is, so how could you ever know anything?” There is new interest in Jo’s eyes, and Nicolò rather likes the glint of it.

“I get by.” Nicolò reaches for his ankle again. “You might regret it if you don’t go.”

“There is nothing left there.”

“If there weren’t, you wouldn’t be so scared of going.”

There is a pause. “I am not welcome.”

“It’s not their decision. They can’t deny you grief.”

Jo blinks at him and smiles. He doesn’t speak for a while, until: “My mother’s family had a dog.”

Nicolò stays silent because what else.

“He wasn’t theirs, exactly, but he would come to their neighbourhood sometimes, hang about their side of the courtyard. Only occasionally at first, mind you. Then he’d be there every day. He’d come down all the way from another village, a bigger one up the coast. Mwie didn’t know his name, so she called him Jabir. Her husband had passed away that year and she loved the company.

“Now I should tell you, it was normal practice to punish thieving strays there—they snatch the poultry and loiter in outer kitchens. They also breed like locust so there was really no sentiment for the individualism of animals as long as they are, well, adequate at their job. It might not be of lawful conduct but some habits just settle, even if they go against the Book. So mwie was the deranged one, you know? Feeding him, holding him.”

Nicolò is aware that he should be getting them high any second now. He'd rather not have Jo saying something he otherwise wouldn’t.

“She was easy with him. Used the tone of her voice instead of her hand or her stick. She had a feeling the dog wasn’t treated right. The truth is, he was beaten senseless by his actual owner, hence the daily trips and the skittishness whenever you moved too sharply around him. No matter how soft you were trying to be, he’d still jump like a concussed flea.

“But he’d always go back. Always. She knew such was dog’s nature, and I think she understood that she couldn’t keep him or stop him. Because then he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.”

Nicolò lets it sit there for a minute. He doesn’t want to talk about this so he moves to the pier-glass where Lelio’s finest awaits. He knows he is closely watched as he measures it with a teaspoon, then lights and inhales.

“Don’t cough,” Jo says, not letting him cough in peace, “research has shown that holding it in or coughing does no good. Something to do with resin and alveoli, I don’t know. Point is, don’t savour it, you’ll get a better kick.”

“Noted.” He frowns. “Research? Pot research?”

“I mean, I don’t think they won a grant to conduct a fucking study, but if you wanna go around sooting your lungs for no reason when you could, like, not do that, be the guest in my humble boudoir.”

“Already was. Your friends have one, don’t they?”

“It’s a fuck-den, is what it is.”

Nicolò laughs and doesn't think about minimum wage or pit fights or the fresh scar tissue on Jo’s ribs. It webs out like gossamer and it shouldn’t be there.

It could've been whole. The image, the skin, the colour. It doesn’t make him less.

He ignores the thought and uses a teaspoon handle to arrange another hit.

“For your head,” he explains to Jo who wouldn’t be able to sit up at this stage. “It’s a little bit like… nettle? At first. But it’s sleep magic, trust me.”

Jo hums. “Sure, I trust you.”

Nicolò simply inhales all of it and holds it in. Then he kneels on the bed and towards Jo’s mouth.

A soft brush to the beard-coarse jaw in place of a question, and Jo makes a slight reach with his open lips, now a needle’s breadth away from Nicolò’s.

The exchange is fast and pungent, and the air whistles through Jo’s teeth. Jo smells of hospital and jasmine bathwater. There’s the metallic tang of blood from his earlier nosebleed too, and a smudge of ylang-ylang. Mostly it’s the weed, though.

They hold the smoke-thread for seconds at most but Nicolò feels pretty loopy. That aromatic fucking journey easily triples the passage of time in his head. The tips of his fingers tingle with a previously unknown sensation, and he is slow to realise it’s Jo’s skin. His skin to Jo’s, in the collarbone’s dip where it’s softest. He pulls away, content.

Five minutes in he ventures a casual _"Thoughts?"_ and Jo lies about having none. So Nicolò stretches out and watches the blank ceiling. Vermilion over dove-grey. They might as well be in a darkroom, soaking in a bath full of fixer. 

Nicolò licks his dry lips before speaking. "I have to ask you something."

Have to. Have to, must— _dois_ , _faut_ , but what? Must he, really? He avoids dabbling in modality, he is not about musts and have tos, so what the fuck? Jo is watching him, he can tell.

"Ask."

"I think there's no need to go to Dugny anymore."

"What, ever?" Jo doesn't sound mad, only amused.

"Not _just_ Dugny."

"I don't hear a question."

Nicolò meets his eyes and everything is sharp now but also rounded, butter-like. Needlepoint meets lard.

"We've done enough," Nicolò decides.

"If you say so. A sieve where palms should be, and my intentions—water."

Right then. Sure. Nicolò spaces out for some sweet ten minutes or thereabouts. Then, “Where did you learn conservation?"

The question seems to give Jo new focus if slightly soapy. "Courses at Ipa. Summer field school for a few years too." He pauses. "Where'd you get such fine pot?"

"Lelio. He has no face."

They drift for a while.

Eventually Jo complains about the cold so Nicolò heaves himself up on a quest for a spare duvet and a pair of habitual Témesta for comfort.

Throwing the duvet over himself and then Jo, he thinks about undressing but then just lets the benzo fog settle. Jo is watching him, cheek squished against the pillow. How soft he is sometimes.

“Tell me your name,” Nicolò says.

“I’m sure you know.”

“Still.”

Jo smiles. “Yusuf. I know you know the rest too.”

Nicolò decides to examine the ceiling. “I know what it is to be afraid of empty things, Yusuf.”

“Speak plainly.”

“You want to go. You are scared. I’m saying it’s alright to be. And if you are scared of going alone, I’m saying you don’t have to.”

Something brushes against his temple—Yusuf’s fingers. “Why would you?”

“I don’t know. I've never been to Morocco.”

"No allies there?" Yusuf half-jokes.

"Plenty. And Ivory Coast."

Yusuf reaches for Nicolò’s chin and gently tips it to face him, maybe to look for a lie. “When?"

Nicolò swallows. "Tomorrow?"

This startles a laugh out of Yusuf, mellowed, comforted Yusuf, who seems moments away from sleep.

"Tomorrow then. Do you fly?"

"Fuck, I never land."

Yusuf insists he buy two tickets then and there using his old tablet, in case he changes his mind come morning. Nicolò does, one-way. His fake passport is clean, others with records trivial enough to allow it, and Yusuf's criminal history is no longer in contention.

The next thing he is aware of is being startled awake by a cat fight outside. It's still dark but the watch blinks four in the morning.

Yusuf must have thrown off the cover in the night, now sleeping completely bare, his improperly dried curls tickling Nicolò's nose.

Yusuf moves, one leg unbending from the knee. On his thigh, a bird shifts and Nicolò watches its flight, the unnatural expansion of wings. It's a buzzard but Yusuf is no predator, he doesn’t survive on prey. Cultivates, maybe.

The tattoo is basic but it looks good. It feels alive, and it surprises Nicolò that he feels the same.

He thinks of the dog then. How one day the dog failed to show up. How it didn’t show the next day either, or the next. How the woman held out, eager to feed him and let him simply be, and how she eventually had to stop waiting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sponsored by: [ya shaifin al malih](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41ZrlBM8e6E) by a-wa


	3. sheher 'ashra, do elqi'eda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yusuf remembers Morocco. Nicolò sees the mountains. An agreement is made.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **chapter cw:** mild anxiety attack, allusions to past domestic abuse, a dash of existential crisis; memories of teenagedom and explorations of one's sexuality + a few slurs mentioned in passing; vague sexual content at the end of the chapter & some real gross sappy stuff.

First, step off the ramp, then cross the wide apron of Rabat–Salé through the hot kiss of noon air. It feels strange on his impostor skin.

Good job, Yusuf.

“Reminds me of Mumbai,” says Nicolò when they take their place in the cab queue outside the terminal.

“We are literally at the airport."

"I am just saying. Sharing thoughts, you know. Musing."

"Be my guest but I’m sure Mumbai is… wetter.”

Nicolò sighs. “I only mean that the air is different. Compared to European autumn? The feeling of otherness.”

“A very healthy colonial attitude, that,” Yusuf says and accepts a slap to his chest with a laugh. “No, no, please continue, I’m enjoying your orientalist sentiments.”

The road to Salé is spent in silence save for the driver’s intermittent inquiries about Yusuf’s family and his opinions on the current state of the French government. He tries his best to interact. It feels machine-like, automated, the ways in which he handles the language.

He is out of his body, soul lagging up far behind. This must be it.

It’s stuck over Andalusia somewhere, snagged its fabric on the stocky spine of the Sierra Morena. Somewhere below, a quaint little village at the mountain’s foot, nothing like the one where his father’s family is still buried, somewhere in the Middle Atlas. Unsung, un-praid. Abandoned. His father never spoke of it.

“Not going past Hay Salam,” says the driver from the main avenue’s curb not far from the turn for Sehb. He flicks the hazard flashers and looks at Yusuf. “I’m sure you know the way.”

Yusuf doesn’t register the exchange of money or the path to the house meandering through the partially reconstructed stacks of the temporary houses and near-labyrinthian narrowness of clay and concrete, patios exposed by half-ruined walls, terraces remade—though now it’s all much cleaner than he remembers.

They’re in front of their house block much too fast. He is left suspended in the lack of readiness. This too is cleaner, the neighbouring house with an open terrace and the cluster of one-storied family homes grouped around a shared patio he knows is there.

Nicolò gives him a questioning look. Yusuf enters.

The scent of sun-warm clay walls hits him before laundry soap and wet concrete do. They pass through the entry and to the patio, the thin whiff of damp coolness escaping the open door to the rear section of the house. They never did manage to get the second floor going, and the unfinished concrete carcass of it towers over one side like a sad giant.

Yusuf looks over the empty space with its evidence of life, of living, its traces vibrant and accusatory in the laundry basins chock-full of dirt-water, over the worn sheepskins with baby sheets laid out for afternoon swaddling.

This space belongs to women.

It speaks of children and labour and care. He has never shared it in the way others might, with no siblings to speak of and his aunt’s children too old to invite him into their play. They were not cruel but he has never felt so alone surrounded by so many of his kin, even when they intersected in Paris after the aunt’s move to France at the chagrin of her entire family, except for Yusuf’s mother.

He doesn’t know where any of them are, never bothered to check after his aunt’s passing. She is buried there too, in Saint-Denis, so far away from home.

But does it really matter where to feed the earth? Such thoughts would have him whipped if only his father could hear them.

Yusuf reaches for some sense of composure.

“Yusuf?”

This is Nicolò, his voice, and his hand so hesitant on Yusuf’s shoulder.

Yusuf swallows past dryness. “I’m good.” He nods, dislodges the hand with a friendly brush of this own. “I am good.”

“I’ll stay here.”

Inside, the room is unchanged, yet it feels entirely foreign.

He doesn’t know where he is.

The ache seizes hold of him at once, that peculiar sort that goes hand-in-hand with longing for the times you’ve never lived, mourning the loss of a thing you’ve never felt. It is physical, visceral, and speaks of devastation he can’t possibly soothe.

“Bismillahi walajnaa,” he tells the room. The invocation fades, unfinished.

The bead curtain is the only barrier between the common room and the bedroom. He dares not go there, instead finding his way into the shared kitchen.

Hafsia, alone, basking in the orange-peel light.

Her wet hands are pressing the fatty bits out of the rziza dough, deft fingers flattening each long strand into pristine thinness. He’s never seen her cook like this.

Braid peeking from beneath the triangle of a too-small scarf, she sits cross-legged with her sleeves stained in flour and her rounded belly stilting her movement. She is beautiful and so very alive.

“Is this your mother’s recipe?” is what he settles on, going for Darija.

“Yusuf!”

She shines as she rises to her feet with a certain degree of awkwardness. She warms him entirely as she takes him into her arms. If only he could pull her in tighter, if only he could spin her round like he used to, but there is pleasure in this too, in exercising care around her belly and her tired body.

“Why didn’t you call? If you’d warned me ahead, I would’ve…”

She looks up at him, searching for words. She must see something in his face which he himself can’t register because then her hands travel to his jaw and up to his cheeks, so gentle and infirm but still so dear. Her hands are remedy, and he is undeserving.

“I’m sorry to be here like this,” he says. “How are you?”

“As you see,” she drops her hands to indicate the overall state of her, then nods at the raw msemen by the stove. “Aïcha’s eldest is to marry tomorrow. Sure my input won’t be fresh but I don’t want to cook all morning. Either way, she’s always treated me rotten.”

“So nothing’s changed around here. Nothing is changing.”

“What do you want it to change into? Another French enclave yet again?”

“No. Maybe less social hypocrisy.” He runs his fingers through the remnants of flour dusting the kitchen top, his tone wondering and near-idle. “It’s the silence, you know? Its weight is impossible here. When everyone leaves things unspoken, it presses this place into the ground. Like Aïcha, committing mundane hatred to your neighbour but insisting the community to be wholesome. We do not suffer from Western individualism here, we do not fester in deviation. Silence and social pretence at the service of cultural duplicity.”

He winces. These words don’t belong here, in the sun-lit space of Hafsia’s honest efforts, however dishonest the sentiment of her intentions is. And his entirely academic pulling-to-pieces should know its place.

“I’m sorry,” he doesn’t look at her, chastised by silence, “that was rude of me. It’s your home.”

“My home.” She puts it to him like a question. “Yusuf, I understand why it hurt you to be home. It hurts all of us one way or another. But I belong here, I do. I can be safe. Do you belong in France? Are you safe there?”

“No. But the safety I needed does not exist at home. It’s the… emancipation of a different sort.”

“And did it bring you happiness?”

“It made me feel like a person.”

“Oh, azizi,” she clicks her tongue and reaches for his face once more, “look at you.”

Yusuf smiles back. “What do you see?”

Hafsia hums, tracing his features as if in deep thought. “The boy who used to collect sea-air in matchboxes and bring it as future dowry because I told him once it was my favourite scent.”

Her hands go to his brows, thumbs smoothing over the arch of them.

“Secondary school graduate who used to hide out in Bibliothèque générale until the storm at home passed, not minding the local title of a coward.” She feels for the knot of scar tissue behind his ear, invisible to all but those in the know. “The man whose mother came this close to burying her light. Her malak, her baraka.”

Yusuf closes his eyes, thinking how strange to be so frank with one-foot barely over the porch.

“She was the only one that ever thought of me this way.”

“Do you know, Yusuf,” she chews on her lip, pausing. “Nobody told us you were alive when you were in the hospital. As far as we knew, you were dead for the day. Your mother, she told my father to ready the table. Ready the water and the shroud.

“Oh, and oh, and oh, over the separation of the young ones, that’s what she sang all morning. Your father told us only by nightfall. And then you were back. Sick, silent, bitter. Never violent but so desperate.”

Desperation seems so foreign to him now, but the memory brings back the skin-deep sensation of his living here, his transitory state and cowardly conduct.

Hafsia smiles. “So this is what I see. But those are mirages, I'm sure.”

Yusuf feels fire in his throat and in his cheeks but his skin is cool under Hafsia’s touch.

"Ah," she says, wiping at his tears, disconcerting. "There will be time for that."

How dare he show up here like this and have her touch. Though this is barely different from when they were just children.

“Forgive me,” he says, “forgive me. I was so selfish, naive. So unhappy. So alone. You were there but I saw through you, same as I saw through everything else.”

“Did you find the cure for that?”

Yusuf thinks of everyone who made home for him in Paris, of his aunt and Andy’s crowd, of Sebastien and of Nile. Of the man waiting for him on the patio.

“I can’t say for sure." What he is… he is in the centre of all things and yet by the very edge of the world. "I can’t say.”

Hafsia touches his hair briefly, maybe to shape it into neatness.

"Are you happy?" Yusuf asks her.

She looks at him with pity. "I am content."

Moving away, she wipes her palms on the sides of her kaftan and nods as if some decision has been made.

“I’ll make up a bed for you in Ilyas and Hakim’s room. They’ll sleep in ours. Jawad won't be back for another week.”

“Hafsia, I am—I’m not alone.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“It’s a friend. From Italy.”

“A tourist,” she smiles. “Interesting choice.”

“He is.” Yusuf shuffles back, feeling like he is back in his jittering eight-year-old body. “Don’t fuss over the bed, I’ll take care of it. And maybe I should take us both to the hammam, wash off the road dust. Is Naimi still standing?”

“Where would it go?” She turns around, suddenly excited. “Can you take Hakim with you?”

“I’m a stranger to him.”

“You are family.” She turns to the stove to arrange out the first batch of her rziza nests. “The children should be in the TV room with mother.”

“And where is…” He can’t make himself finish.

“At the store. He always is these days. Sleeps there too.”

Suppose there is no sense commuting from Rabat when you’ve got nothing to go back to.

Hafsia turns to the stove. “Tell mother the msemen dough is done, she insists on checking every time. Always tells me I handle it too fast. Where are you running, Hafsia, it’s not a Casa brothel and you’re no university boy.”

“She says that to you?”

“She’ll say even more dirt to you, don’t provoke her. Off with you now.”

Yusuf goes, feeling like a fly out of place. Nicolò gives him an odd look and nothing more but seems to take the offer of the hammam with interest.

Fetching Hakim goes smoother than he expected it to pass, remembering Hafsia’s mother to be a woman of deep affection and protective violence, like all Moroccan mothers. Like his own. He remembers mama to be strong, unpredictable, half-sweet and half-brutal. Unmatched and yet like any other.

“How wonderful,” Hafsia’s mother tells him after instructing Hakim to pack his small bag, “there is nobody to take him. Jawad, pah! Always in the city, the neighbouring boys stay away. And the boiler is so costly to use these days but we avoid washing in cold water, look what good it did to your mother. Only before ablutions, you understand. Hafsia tries to heat some on the stove, but that might as well take a week…”

Yusuf nods, trying his best to keep his nervous hands out of pockets. It surprises him how easy she is with words.

“And this one,” she softly jolts baby Ilyas with her knee where the boy is lounging like a lazy summer bug, “don’t even speak of water to this. Imagine what he’ll be like by seven!” She lets out an admonishing clicking sound, the universal language of mothers, and fixes Yusuf with a shrewd look. “And don’t talk that rich people language around the children, do you hear me, boy?”

Yusuf nods again.

“Only look at Hakim! Already dirtied his mind enough. He used to steal Jawad’s mobile in the night, can you believe it? Look at all sorts of sin. So none of that with you two.”

“I’m taking my friend too. From Europe.”

“And does this friend speak Arabic? Then no speaking for all of you. You boys would stand to keep quiet for once.”

  
  
  


They don’t speak on their way to the hammam or inside. Nicolò doesn’t appear to be too shy about bathing like this and studies the zellij walls with an eye of someone who only casually dabbles in art appreciation.

“What is Paris like?” Hakim asks him as Yusuf gently washes the boy’s back with a scrubbing glove. “Is it like on TV?”

“Yes and no. It looks like what you see on TV. But it’s a little bit worse.”

“How?”

“The dirt is worse. The waste.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, I’m sure your mother teaches how important it is to be polite. To your parents, to your elders, and to all people. It’s not so common where I live now. Especially to someone who looks like you or me.”

“But Mourad and his brothers and his friends, they are not good to me. And they sell kif and maajoun and bring wine from the medina.”

“Not everyone is a good student of faith. Or of their parents. Are you a good student?”

“I think so.”

“So what is it I hear about you looking at filth on your father’s phone?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Hakim turns to look at him, eyes wide, “I only wanted to see how to… how to talk to someone.”

“All right, all right.” Yusuf makes him face the wall again. “So you fancy someone, is that it?”

“Not anymore.” He pauses, and Yusuf gives him an encouraging hum. “She is Mourad’s sister. Their parents don’t want us to be friends.”

“But why did you need the phone for that?”

“Mother says Hachmia is very modern. I think it’s because Hachmia likes all this French stuff. She wants to move to Marrakech after school. She says Paris is her dream in life.”

Yusuf massages the Cadum shampoo into the boy’s hair, thinking. “How old is she, Hakim?”

“Fifteen?”

Yusuf suppresses a laugh. “I think, for now, you should find someone your age.”

“But older boys always marry younger girls. Father is so old!”

“I know,” Yusuf says, quiet. Jawad pissed him off on sight even back then, looking fit enough to be Hafsia’s father rather than a husband. Man had stable employment outside of Sabh and Hay Salam, though, and promised Hafsia plenty of freedom. “I know. But I’m sure you know it’s different for girls.”

“It’s stupid.”

At that Yusuf finally laughs. “I see why they call you a deviant. Rinse your hair now.”

After cleaning himself and putting away the soap and ghassoul in Hakim’s bag, Yusuf reaches for the big towel in his tote. He moves closer to where Nicolò is seated, now in a towel around his waist. His fingers seem to be itching for a smoke.

“Good talk?” Nicolò speaks in a whisper, lest the deviant child’s ears catch the cursed tongue. Or so Yusuf assumes, with great cheer. 

“Yeah, I feel like we really bonded,” Yusuf replies with a hefty slice of sarcasm. “Can’t wait to get the honorary invitation to his circumcision.”

“Is that a communal thing?”

“For the whole neighbourhood. It’s for the mother as much as it is for the child, so I expect Hafsia to _youyou_ her heart out all day. She’s always liked that part.”

“Did you enjoy yours?”

Yusuf squints at him. “Very much. All the gifts, the attention. Though it got really boring with the tolbas. But I looked rather lovely.”

Nicolò smiles. His free hand traces idly over one knee. “I meant to ask. What is the plan? Will you visit the grave?”

Yusuf thinks on it. He is far too disjointed for that. Ground wobbles under his feet. “No. Some other time.” He nods. “Another time.”

“So then, what next? Just leave?”

Hakim has finished with his hair and is now tracing the mosaic patterns on the floor. Any other parent would tell the boy to quit engaging in idleness, as his father would do with him and drag him by the ear after, but Yusuf is not a parent.

“I want to see the library. In Rabat. It was my place, sort of.” He looks at Nicolò. “Do you want to see anything in particular? Casablanca, the coast?”

“I’m fine following you,” Nicolò says and gets to his feet, his towel slipping past his backside. “Just don’t get lost.”

  
  
  


That night, Yusuf struggles to find sleep. Curled in the corner of the children’s room, he watches the moon travel the lopsided eye of the window.

“Yusuf,” Nicolò calls softly from across the room. He’s chosen to sleep closer to the door. “I have some pills, if you want. Help you with sleep.”

“Your generosity, Cocò. Thank you though.”

“More to me.” Nicolò turns to face him, the whites of his eyes stark in the moonlight. “I’m curious. Why are they living in your house?”

“Hafsia’s husband is the son of my grandmother’s cousin. She wanted Hafsia to move in. Jawal is always off to Rabat or Casa either way.”

“Is it yours now?”

“Maybe. I want it to be theirs. I think it’s beautiful for it to become a safe space. There is so much love here. Just Hafsia and the children.” He blinks at the clouds passing over the moon’s fat crescent. “I’m not sure when my father moved out.”

“Does it mean it was unsafe?”

“What?”

“You said they are making the house safe. So did he make it unsafe?”

“Only when I was here. When mother was here.”

Nicolò says nothing more for a long while. Then, “I think I’d like to see the mountains.”

“We could rent a car in Rabat,” Yusuf offers. “Skirt to the Middle Atlas. It’s not far.”

“Let’s do that. First thing in the morning.” He pauses. “I miss the mountains sometimes. Late spring in I Appennìn.”

“Spend a lot of time there?”

“We had these trips… once or twice a year. The entire home went. All the nuns—so frantic to keep our count. I loved to be in a bigger space.”

They share more of the silence.

Nicolò goes on, “One time, this villager had a really nasty accident—he fell off a hayloft, right on a pitchfork,” he makes a vivid hand gesture visible even in the dark, “the thing went through the back. Missed the lung but it was just… sticking through. It was October, so the cold helped him, in the end. But it was the first time I encountered… human fragility? I mean, in such a grotesque fashion. It moved me. Got this idea in my head to become a doctor.”

“That’s noble.”

“I made big plans. Go to UniGe, become the best medical student in my year. Fuck it, my entire course. Get the best placement somewhere in the surgical like,” he snaps his fingers, “right out of the gate.” A long pause then. “Yes, I had really nice dreams.”

“What about now?”

“I don’t think about it now. At this point, it’s enough to survive.”

Something brushes his wrist. Nicolò’s fingers are barely there but they bring calm. “Try to sleep, Yusuf. You are driving tomorrow.”

“I hate driving.”

“I know. Very exciting for me.”

“Fuck off,” Yusuf tells him in Arabic and, with Nicolò’s hand so close to his, soon falls sleep.

  


* * *

  


The shop hasn’t changed. Maybe the storefront print is brighter now. Better ink, or newer. Tapis and tissu, contact Ibrahim for custom orders.

It’s too early for Rabat’s medina to be this crowded—but again, seems like it’s another thing Yusuf has forgotten. 

Before he could lose his nerve and retreat back to the barber's where Nicolò has surrendered himself for a full shave, Yusuf takes a step towards the store.

He enters its shabby cave and leaves the morning bustle of the Old Market behind the roll-up door.

His father looks up from the counter, half-ready to smile at a regular or perhaps a generous ex-pat. Yusuf sees dull recognition in those eyes and then they leave him.

Nothing seems to change here, it’s true.

Yusuf steps toward the rug-covered wall closest to him. Traces the lowest row, feeling for the polyester but finding only wool that feels closer to silk. It’s good. Why would he be bitter?

“I’m looking for a sajjada,” he offers. “Something lighter. Not very loud.”

His father doesn’t answer but disappears inside the tiny backroom.

Yusuf uses this time to examine the fabrics lined in front and around the counter, the brass bowls overflowing with glass beads and sequins.

Plunging his hand deep in one of the larger bowls pulls an image to his mind’s eye, one so full of colour and longing he has to step back and flex his fingers.

His memories of her, much like she herself did, always carry the scent of orange blossom water. The scent of baraka, his mother insisted. 

_Listen to me, Yusuf_ —her voice, not yet weakened by sickness and torture of life, her hands sorting the beads to be sold with new arrivals of fabrics— _listen to me, my little bird, my brawn, my people, my light, the memory of me…_

Listen to me!

_Years of the gazelle, years of the locusts, year of the sword and the canon, year of the fair season, our blood still tastes like legend. Who will learn the illiterate songs, the thorns in the soles of the feet, a caravan of rundown people hunted by the plague and trachoma, Bni Kalboun to the east, Bni Ara to the west…_

Oh, little mother, tell me about the silos of Doukkala, tell me about Jebel Akhdar, sing me Hayna’s lament…

_Hayna, Hayna, what will you eat for dinner, where will you sleep tonight? My dinner is oats and my bed among the dogs!_

Listen, listen…

The rug lands on the counter with a low thud, prompting the beads into a short song.

Yusuf looks at his father’s hands. Motionless, they hover over the rug’s soft fringe. It’s strange to think of his father as old, senescent. The last memory of these hands surfaces images of skin unblemished and so far from the parchment he sees now.

“How much?” Yusuf asks, knowing he will be drawing these hands later. 

“Four thousand. Angora goat.”

As if it needs to be explained. As if it is Yusuf's first encounter with mohair.

Yusuf puts four euro bills together and passes them across the counter, careful to avoid contact. He receives a black poly bag. Its faded BMW logo bulges under the rug’s heft.

Wallet shoved back in the pocket and bag under his arm, Yusuf observes his father’s downturned face. The man’s frame ranks of _Favorites_. Still a heavy smoker then.

“Look at me,” Yusuf says.

Nothing.

For Yusuf, there is no composure to speak of at this moment, nor there is fear. Something more base in him, in his skin and under it, not anxiety but the deep tremor of a God-fearing child. He is all shiver, amplified.

“Don’t you know me?”

His father turns away.

“You should. I am the son of Zahira. Her only son. You have always disliked that."

His father's hands are poised over a piece of unrolled fabric. Emerald green. Holy. Nothing betrays his mind. But Yusuf knew what to look for, always.

And so Yusuf has to explain, has to tell him. "I knew your hands by heart. They did their best to erase her touch. I knew the sound your steps made in prelude to terror. Your eyes were all I saw at night. And hers, after. Your voice was a black cloud on my world. Your djinns were my consorts.”

The heat is gathering at the back of Yusuf’s neck despite the looseness of the rayon collar.

“Won’t you look at me?”

His father moves towards the backroom. “What for?”

Yusuf has to leave. Back in the street, reality hits him like a wave of something wicked.

Much later, Yusuf would think back on his hurried escape with a comforting sense of apathy. But in the moment, rushing through the medina’s camphor-fetid streets, he feels only hurt.

  
  
  


From the flat terrace of the cafe, he can make out the silhouette of Salé.

The morning is clear enough to see past the banks of Bouregreg and recognise his city’s scarce hillsides leading to the opening of Bettana and the sloping flats of residential districts orbiting the Great Mosque.

In his hand, his grandmother’s tasbih. It’s simple opaque agate, with a short tassel and not much embellishment.

“She had nothing but the house and this, and the Book,” Hafsia told him earlier this morning. Even took him into a secluded corner under the unfinished terrace to convey the message where her family couldn’t see. She had the beads in one hand and the Qur'an in the other. It was wrapped in white fabric that had been used to shroud mwie in death. “It’s all yours.”

He took both and hid the Book deep in his travel bag, folding the tasbih inside his miniature pouch with art supplies. Later, he would take it out again and place it in the inner pocket of his jacket.

It fits in his palm better than it must’ve worked for mwie’s small hands, he notes now, and slips it back inside. He only took it out at the prompt of the muezzin calling for Dhuhr.

Yusuf looks down and across the street where Nicolò is finalising the deal for their rental. Look at him, Yusuf thinks with fondness, with his clean passport and put-upon pleasantness of a tourist. 

Before his failure at parental bonding in the medina, they’d taken the tramway. Before that, a short and too-humid urban hike from Sehb to Arrazi which Nicolò seemed to appreciate for no apparent reason. 

“It’s the space,” he explained when they reached the stop. “I feel closer to things.”

“Glad you’re discovering yourself on this exotic pilgrimage,” Yusuf mumbled and enjoyed Nicolò’s answering smile.

“What did you get?” Nicolò says now, finally climbing to the terrace and easing himself into the seat across. “Nevermind. We should go. Finish up and let’s head out.”

Yusuf frowns. “You in a hurry?”

Nicolò doesn’t meet his eyes. “Why stay idle?”

“Why rush?”

Nicolò shakes his head, lets out a long breath. His knee refuses to stay still. “We’ll go to the mountains. I even bought a map.”

He even bought a map. Sometimes this man reminds him of a cartoon character, something out of the Captain Majid serial. 

“And then?”

Nicolò shrugs. “Keep going. I don’t know.”

Yusuf counts a couple of hundred dirhams for the check plus some and gets up. “What’s gotten into you?”

When they exit onto the street, Nicolò gestures at the dark navy pickup parked by the entrance. It's fancier than he expected, one of the last year’s Frontiers. He's never driven anything past the 1997 assembly date.

“Your majesty,” Nicolò throws both their bags and the polyethene-wrapped rug into the boot, “your carriage.”

Inside, it smells of antiseptic and faintly of herbs. Like something he remembers from the Eid al-Kebir when he refused to cut the goat's throat to the disappointment of his father because he much preferred to spend his hours in the kitchen, helping his mother and mwie, and sometimes his aunt, where they steamed the animal's head over wood and slow coals with butter and mint and the herbal mix that was distinctly salā.

“If you make me listen to that unlawful fucking Susanna song, Cocò,” Yusuf says, starting the engine and eyeing the AUX adapter in Nicolò’s hand.

“It’s a classic. _Cocòrito, non mi compri col patè…_ ”

Yusuf sighs and looks for the nearest exit to the rocade. The two-hour drive to Meknes is sure to test him.

  


* * *

  


Often there was beauty in death, or rather in the art of its observance.

Yusuf is never more aware of these notions than when he enters cities that are more ancient than new. 

Death exists in Meknes beautifully, in the stuccowork of the Mausoleum walls and the shine of its brass finials, the star-like fountain of the Moulay Ismail burial chamber, and always mosaic, mosaic, more mosaic. Yusuf has always loved the safety of their patterns.

Meknes is a proud city, bloated and old. Its heart touches history, and its roads bear the touch of Roman greed. It is behind them now.

They are parked off N6 facing a reservoir that brackets the road from both sides. The faux-posh orange tree joint they elected to skip is still visible, barely a klick out, but they are more than content to gorge on the cafe’s takeout.

The unusually deep bed of their truck proves to be a great lunch spot.

Their arms touch as they eat, and Yusuf is reminded of his grandmother, sharing sheepskin around the familial spread. Couscous platter at the centre and a plateful of msemen, the teapot sitting empty by the carpet’s edge.

Their meals were quick, almost frantic. Could knock all wind out of him if he blinked too slow. With Nicolò, he feels an odd, foreign sense of peace. When they don’t speak, this strange tranquillity shrouds his senses. He feels lighter. His body travels and his mind is undisturbed.

Nicolò tells him something about how good the coffee is in between generous gulps as he washes down the cold crêpes. He speaks of how much he enjoys the view—these poor imitation waterworks.

“Nice concrete,” Yusuf nods, looking over the reservoir’s artificial bed. He readies himself for what’s next, “I think it’s best we spend the night in Fes. Head out fresh in the morning.”

Nicolò is clearly conflicted at the idea, but something else wins over the wariness. Doesn’t mean he won’t sigh for good measure, though.

“Fes it is,” Nicolò sighs again, to punctuate. “Let’s see what she’s like.”

Fes shows herself off as a city more immense than Meknes but also more composed. An ancient animal of Idrisid facades, tamed by time. A sprawling, dozing beast with Najdi eyes and not-quite-ruined gardens.

They spend the afternoon cruising the city, never exactly stopping at the sights but nonetheless skimming them with their curious eyes from the coolness of the truck. Nissan’s bed hosts their lunch once more, which is a big word to describe the pair of them swallowing street food and watching the people enter Jerusalem mosque for the sunset prayer.

It would be lovely to show Nicolò other forms in which his people shared joy and peace, but… 

“A shame we’re too late for summer moussems. I think you would’ve enjoyed the one in Berkane. They harvest clementines.”

Nicolò asks about the difference between festivals and moussems, of the Amazighs who hold them. He is oddly curious when he says: “Do you speak Berber?”

Yusuf smiles. “There is more than one.”

“Do you speak _a_ Berber?”

“No. A little Tachelhit. I can greet someone, tell them my name. Thank them.”

“Tell me something?”

“I don’t think… it’s not a—a circus act. Does it make sense?”

Nicolò nods. They watch the downtown regurgitate its tourist hordes mixed with the hustling locals.

They talk about Italian pop music and Yusuf’s distaste towards Celentano flicks, especially the one loosely based on Shakespeare. 

“It’s disgusting.”

“It’s of the time. And the times were different.”

“Discrimination is timeless. Questionable behaviour is timeless. Male chauvinism is sure fucking timeless. It’s just that back then, it was easy to ignore the voices of discontent and remain faultless.”

Nicolò makes a strange wave. “I get that, of course I get that. I am just saying. There are still some merits to disgusting things. Some of them, at least.”

“Which are?”

“The chicks in his pictures were hot.” His face is blank but it soon gives way to a lopsided smile. “The truth is, it was forbidden. Me and a few other boys would sneak into this barbershop and watch them sometimes. Watching something forbidden felt exciting.”

“Ah, I used to look at Al Mawed at the hairdressers. Mother would talk, she’d talk forever while getting the most insignificant of haircuts because she had nobody else to speak to, I suppose, and I’d look through every issue, every scandal, every black-and-white snapshot of socialites from the pop world far away. Egypt, Lebanon.

“My favourite was the one with Sherihan on the cover. I was about thirteen, fourteen, and she looked right at me from the page, in full colour. She had lovely half-wild hair and impossible red lips and those eyes. Sensual, yes, but also so tired. I saw a lot of sadness in her. Maybe it was just me.”

Nicolò gives him one of those strange looks Yusuf has become familiar with.

“You saw a beautiful woman in the mid-90s and thought ‘I understand her sadness’. Yusuf, you lewd freak.”

Yusuf flicks a sunflower seed at him. Nicolò balls a greasy shawarma paper and aims at Yusuf’s head. Nobody pays them attention. 

  
  
  


As night settles, they find themselves parked by a public garden.

Nicolò is watching the stars, whatever he can get of them in the belligerent city lights. The two of them are hidden from the street by the truck’s cabin. It feels good to be concealed in this darkness made of the park’s poor street light system.

Nicolò is huddling in one of Hafsia’s camel wool blankets as he studies the sky.

“It’s timeless,” Nicolò tells him. “This light. A thousand millennia, more? It makes no sense to me. I can’t stand it sometimes.”

“Our worst fears are those of the ungraspable, I find. It’s beyond anything we could come up with as a species.”

“Narrow minds…”

“We can't help but anthropomorphise everything. Our definitions are laughable in the face of all this cosmic shit. Makes us feel strangely lost. Is that how you feel?”

“You’re giving me the chills,” Nicolò complains. “Talk about something cosy.”

“What do you wanna hear?”

Nicolò tilts his head, eyes still on the half-invisible stars. “You were going to marry Hafsia, no?”

“That was the intention.”

“An arrangement?”

“No, actually. She was meant for someone else, a fellow Rbati she’s never met. But she knew I wouldn’t hold her back, or so she told me. Nobody in Salé liked it. _‘Slawls can never have affection for Rbatis, even if the river were to become milk and the sand raisins.’_ That’s the saying.”

“But you were engaged?”

“We planned to be. For years, the fools.”

“This is a long time.”

“We had to hide. Something she said at the time stayed with me. _‘It’s a pity to hide when the sun shines between us.’_ ”

Nicolò seems to process it. “I think I understand,” he says, tone strange. “And then?”

Yusuf sighs. “And then I had an accident. I refused to let it happen again. And she, well. She knew I would die if I stayed. Die for certain.”

“People in books die for romance.”

“Romance isn’t for our Morocco. Being in love isn’t for our Morocco. And it wasn’t for us. People are afraid of love here. It’s only for women, they say, and only in special moments.”

“And Hafsia?”

“Hafsia only ever wished for safety in marriage and some freedom. I was her best chance. We loved each other in our own way. But I was no good for her, in the end. Selfish. I wanted insane things.”

“Such as?”

“Be home-free. Study art. Earn with art. Write, maybe. Men.”

A moment passes. Yusuf feels cotton-deaf.

“The scar on your neck,” Nicolò says, at last, “is from the accident?”

“One of them.”

Nicolò asks with his eyes for permission before touching it, but when his fingers press to the dead tissue it feels like nothing. His touch is chaste and gives Yusuf an odd sense of purity.

“You are doing all right,” Nicolò concludes.

Am I? Am I, at all, _doing_? Yusuf feels something within him tremble. It is the city around him and within him, in his flesh. His shoulder takes on the weight of Nicolò’s tired head. Yusuf doesn’t need to check to know his eyes are closed.

A long time ago, Yusuf was the one entrusting his heavy body into the care of others. Now it’s his hands soothing the pain away, cradling the drunkards, kissing the temples of friends.

Once again silence. It takes another minute for Nicolò to shift away and lie down fully, eyes returning to the dark sky. His face is calmer than it was on the road.

Nicolò exhales. “Life is good, no?”

Yusuf laughs. “I suppose.” He scratches at his beard. “Yes.”

“I want to tell you something,” Nicolò suddenly cuts in.

“Sounds serious.”

“It’s… I got a call yesterday. From Napoli. There is a wedding… one of the five hundred Di Lauro cousins, doesn’t matter, but the reality is that it does. You see, weddings are for networking and re-evaluations of trust.”

“Can’t miss it, in other words. Why are you here, then?”

Nicolò folds his hands over his flanneled chest. Their eyes meet.

“It’s on Monday. I still have two-and-a-half, three days? Starting now.”

“Sure. But I honestly don’t get it. We just gather road dust and use shawarma as fuel.”

“I agree, it’s fantastic.”

“Nicolò.”

“Yusuf.”

Nicolò just looks at him. He never allows himself to do this during the day, Yusuf realises.

“Just keep me with you for a while,” Nicolò says. “Can you?”

It appears that Yusuf still wants insane things. Touch silently shared, spaces devoured, desires overthrown.

“Of course.”

Reaching to soothe the stiff lock of Nicolò’s hands, he is thankful for the dark allowing them this contact.

  


* * *

  


In Ifran, they take a short tech break at a neat little tourist-trap with a wide fountain courtyard and half-a-dozen early skiers. A flock of Westerners are currently bent over a yellowed Lonely Planet tome, slightly to their left.

Nicolò eyes them as if challenging their legitimacy, or maybe asserting his higher grade of authenticity. Yusuf finds it charming. Maybe because Nicolò never indulges.

“I think we should go,” Nicolò says, frowning at his phone. “It won’t charge any faster.”

“I told you to get that car charger in Fes, didn’t I. Didn’t I.”

“My mind wasn’t in it.”

“Your mind in the morning,” Yusuf clicks his tongue, “is a gutter.”

In the morning, they took an early leave from the roadside hotel after a night full of international calls for Nicolò and sketching and exchanging emails with the Institute for Yusuf.

The television was playing some local soap where they spoke Moroccan Arabic which struck Yusuf with a memory of a radio, their precious bulky transmitter kept in the patio cupboard used for ‘the good plates’.

They’d gather together for the news and music and plays, and it was one of those afternoons when he first heard Darija not from the people in his street but spoken in a poised radio voice somewhere in Rabat or Casablanca…

It had been a soap opera, and he was enraptured with the familiar emotion of it. His mother loved to listen to the political program to which his father objected, so she’d invent a new pretence every other week to visit Nejima across the street and soak it all in while busying her hands with dough.

 _Dimoqratia_ , she’d tell him later, _dimoqratia w’al haqiqya_.

She never enjoyed any of that promised truth. Or democracy, for that matter.

And the first time they heard French on Medi One—a particular favourite among rough, sinewy young men who listened to the voices of Tangier on their pocket transistors while selling cheap smokes on the _derb_ corner—his father sold the radio. The television became their new friend.

At the hotel, Yusuf left it turned to a satellite channel playing some Bengali drama reruns. Nicolò slept through it with enviable ease while Yusuf watched the passing cars from the balcony. He’d bought a pack of _Favorites_ earlier that night, just to try. Immersion therapy or whatever.

“Come inside,” he heard through the curtain gauze. “Insomnia is for the weak.”

Yusuf went.

“So why Tichoukte?”

Nicolò’s question hung in the narrow space between their beds.

“It’s closer, as far as mountains go. I mean, there’s no way we’d make it to High Atlas with your deadline.”

As if sensing the time to be a little fragile, Nicolò waited.

Yusuf rubbed at his mouth. “My father’s family came from the area. Somewhere between the massif and the river. He never told me which village.”

“Are you hoping for something?”

“No. Nothing at all.”

After that, he slept poorly but woke with coffee waiting for him. At breakfast, he caught Nicolò’s eyes and found the other man deeply detached.

Much like he is now, struggling with the faulty charger of his outdated phone and throwing Yusuf these _looks_. The man probably thinks himself inconspicuous.

“What is it, Nicolò?”

“Maybe we should stop.”

“You could explain.”

“Maybe it’s not… fair. To you. I don’t know.”

Yusuf sighs. His temples are on fire. “We’re here. We’re going to Tichoukte. We’re going to Taza. And we’re going to Tangier.”

“It was insane of me to make you do this.”

“I can’t deal with this right now.” Yusuf gets up and stretches. “Finish your charging. I’ll sleep in the car.”

It’s nearing noon when Nicolò climbs into the passenger seat, more subdued than before. It’s like he’s waiting for Yusuf to speak first. All right.

“I need you to understand, _monsieur voyou_ ,” Yusuf tells him before they get back on de Sefrou. “You didn’t make me do anything. You don’t make me do things. You _can’t_ make me do things.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Now find us a working station.”

Halfway to Boulemane, they catch an oldie station with a radio-cut of what seems to be one of those twenty-minute Samira Said anthems from the eighties.

Fuck. It’s the familial radio all over again. He’s back there, on the patio with its summer seaweed stench and district’s stewing garbage. All clouded with mwie’s poor attempts to cleanse it, literally and spiritually, by burning herbs the way her mother taught her. She insisted they took turns standing in the thick, rank clouds for seven minutes. Something for the soul.

Nicolò asks about the song, so Yusuf attempts a loose translation but gives up on the second refrain, too distracted by the progression of the instrumental and his emotional fucking journey as they climb towards the town, past Boulemane’s mosque that tells him it’s of the honourable Sidi Abdel Wahid, past the bakery and bank and an arched thing not far from the hospital called _Italia Banane_ which amuses Nicolò to no end—until they reach the weather-worn concrete box that turns out to be a mosque guarding the town’s exit and Yusuf feels an abrupt need to stop and breathe, an urgency so profound and baffling he flicks the flashers on and swerves the car to the unpaved verge.

It’s pure blindness. His ears hear nothing but waterfalls of sticky, sharp noise. His vision dances with colour. Something heavy blocks his throat, extending to his chest and into the depths of his stomach. It’s viscous, terrible, and so cold.

Yusuf presses a hand to his sternum. _Breathe, little baraka, breathe_ , someone croons into his ear—

 _—Ça va_ , is what Nicolò asks him, or seems to be anyway— _labas_ , _ça ira_ , Yusuf hears himself say, _c'est rien_ , _c'est rien_ , _waxxa d'accord_ … 

He breathes in silence, shielding his eyes from the sharp mountain sun in the steering wheel’s rancid leather. The thing in his stomach shifts, shrinking away. It’s sickening.

“I feel sick,” he says.

“Is it the road?”

“The road. The air. Everything. I feel sick. I feel like a stranger.”

For the first time in so long, the silence is oppressive. It's dense, impossible. Nothing like last night when Yusuf basked under Nicolò’s unguarded, wistful gaze.

“Nicolò. You never look at me during the day.”

“I do.”

“Not the way I mean.”

“I don’t understand,” he lies.

“Just,” Yusuf waves at himself, still weak. “Look at me sometimes in the light. So I know I’m not alone.”

“You are not.”

Yusuf breathes still. “I am a stranger everywhere.”

There is no reply, but slow hands touch his hair. Hesitant as always but not spooked. Cool palms and coarse fingers bush over his nape now slick with anxious sweat. Nicolò says nothing at all but Yusuf feels the silence lighten once again.

“Death catches up to us at odd moments,” Nicolò tells him.

“I know. I remember now.”

 _Ya haram, what's gotten into you_ —was that what she started it with that night?—come now, what are you so afraid of, come now, does death frighten you this much, don’t you know we do not end, silly boy, how can we end if we never had a beginning—don’t shake your head at me now, and don’t be sad, you are blessed to be a witness, don’t you know it, so witness me on my wedding night— what wedding?—my rejoining with eternity, me and a million more lights.

It should be him, he told her anyway, it should be me.

We belong to God, his mother chastised, and God does what he wants with us.

“Yusuf,” Nicolò’s whisper is soft where it caresses the back of Yusuf’s neck. “You are here.”

“Where is that?”

“Where you came from. The way you told me about it. The mountains. The desert. The city. You told me you are not a good Muslim and a worse Moroccan. I don’t know what you are. I know that I will follow you. Now, then, later. This must mean something. Yusuf, surely it means something.”

Truly, the world has turned inside out. He exhales.

“Open your eyes,” Nicolò says. “You are here. All of this is you.”

“None of it is me.”

“All of it. Salé, Paris, Rabat, Saint-Denis.”

Don’t talk nonsense, Yusuf wants to say, you’re a support group pamphlet, not a man.

Don’t talk.

Stop talking.

“I won’t talk, Yusuf. I won’t talk.”

In the blue of the Tichoukte afternoon, Yusuf allows his grief to overtake him.

  


* * *

  


Taferdouste is to his liking. It's an old kasbah that found its nest above a Guigou riverbend. The river level is modest in the wadi below, the juniper plentiful and cedars looking ill.

They’re only half an hour past Boulemane but this air is the cleanest thing he’s ever tasted. Behind him, the old fortress casts a long shadow over the narrow path that circles the plateau.

It’s small but its energy makes him feel like he is touching the past itself. Like he could blink and miss the millennia-old villagers trickling back into the intramural space before sundown, the lone fortress guard bolting the cedar gates shut.

“There is a cave,” Nicolò calls somewhere behind him, from what he assumes is the entrance to the said cave.

“Don’t go into the cave, Nicolò.” Yusuf turns around to see Nicolò bent at the waist and peering into the cave set low in the sandstone wall. “All here is fragile.”

“The mountains… are fragile?”

“In a sense. It’s like… a cake? A cake of limestone and sand. Cut by the water.”

“So,” Nicolò straightens, smiling, “we are at the bottom of an ancient ocean.”

“Could be.”

When Nicolò joins him at the ledge, standing so close to the brink feels less dangerous.

“Places like these, when I close my eyes…” Yusuf does so for a brief second. “I swear I can see extinct creatures swim above me. Prehistoric men hunting in the wadi. Fishing. Bathing in the river.”

Nicolò looks at him. “You’re giving me the chills. Do you want to go to the river?”

Down by the water, they shed socks and shoes and plunge their feet deep into the ice-cold current. Crystalline in the mud.

He is awash with the strong fragrance of cedars and woad made sharper by the cool autumn air.

This land is so dry yet frozen-solid, it’s drought in the juniper steppes and week-long rains in the massifs, it’s the overstacked slums with its flies and starving dogs and kerosine-fueled villages with old people who do nothing.

Then, the proud academia of the ancient cities now modernised, the art old and new, the pride of the land. With it, the ostentatious elite of Casablanca and Marrakech thriving in pristine spaces. Old castes swapped for class.

Nicolò pulls him back, splashing in the rocky river bed. His skin has gone pink all the way up to the ankles.

“Enough for you,” Yusuf says. He unwinds his jersey scarf and passes it to Nicolò. “Dry yourself up. If you end up getting a cold…”

“It’s like I found a mother in you.”

Yusuf looks up at him sharply, not knowing how to respond to this. Because what is the general mood here? Sincere, vulnerable, sarcastic? All of the above?

“Stop thinking,” Nicolò says. “Come sit.”

They watch the water from the bank, Yusuf’s head in his hands and heavy with fatigue.

“Anyone can see us from the kasbah,” Yusuf murmurs. “Thinking, what pair of idiots chill on the ground in October.”

“I’m connecting with nature. Don’t know about you.”

“Me too. Nature is interesting. You’re an interesting animal.”

“Nice. Am I rare?”

“Not really. But very peculiar.”

“How so?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Take your time.” 

Yusuf gathers his words. “You see, some urban mammals, whether they’re born into captivity or brought into it from, you know, exotic faraway lands, they have no choice but to revolt in order to survive. Untamed, they are put down. Tamed, they are not truly alive, and they are never really safe.

“And then there are mammals who are allowed to leave and roam and do anything at all, maybe they start off tough, born into bad places, but they are free of danger from the hands of their keepers. And yet they make a very specific choice to revolt, no reasoning to it. It’s never the last resort. It’s never the only choice. It’s _a_ choice. And that’s very peculiar. Like volunteer unpaid conscription.”

“See, not that complicated,” Nicolò concludes and reaches down to draw on the dry mud. “Un po' troppo forte with the metaphor there.”

“Yeah, don’t bring it up.”

“But I will. Because I’m sure it took everything from you to escape that. I’m sure you don’t feel very secure.”

“Could’ve been worse.”

“Could’ve been worse for me too. It's funny. It took not even one full minute to choose easy… profitable malice. There are many fine justifications. Ragazzo orfano, yes. Class, faith, disparity. All of it. It all means absolutely nothing in the face of… the luxury of choice. To disrupt the world and the people who can’t choose at all.”

He slowly unfolds.

“But it also takes a lifetime to leave.”

How odd, Yusuf thinks. “Do you want to?”

“Leave?” Nicolò looks surprised, then it shifts into something indecipherable. “There are days. Weeks. Well, it’s been a few years. But it’s too late for me.”

“So what, if you just decided one day, that's it, I’m out—they’d have to kill you?”

His laugh is sweet. “You watch too many Hollywood movies.”

“I mean, I've seen it happen.”

“Yes but for me, it's just. I’ll just have to be quiet and patient. It takes a long time.”

“Only you know what’s best for you.”

Nicolò gets to his feet. “These days I doubt it.”

  


* * *

  


Moonlight spills through the louvred shutters of their room. It’s warm in their shared bed, and the guesthouse is dead-quiet despite the influx of Moroccan vacationers.

Theirs was the last room left, on the ground floor and capable of fitting only a bed and a cupboard with a bathroom the size of his Parisian closet.

“Wash your feet,” he told Nicolò. “And don’t smoke here.”

“You’re in a mood.”

“I’m going out. Don’t lock the door.”

It had been a blind drive. As if he was being chased for three hours straight by something unseen, through paved mountain roads past the cedar parks and the peaks named after martyrs, into highland dirt-and-gravel serpentine and bypassing the small clusters of life in Ait Chaaib and Aichoune, and, once back on the rocade, following the bend of the overflowing Sebou and leaving it behind to meet the afternoon lights of El Kheir that lived between the shadow of Jbel Tazzeka and the long stretches of dry steppes.

“There is a lake,” Yusuf said absently while they refuelled in El Kheir. “In the National Park, a bit further up north. We could make a stop, then circle back to Taza.”

Nicolò carefully chews through pharmacie crisps. He watches the path of Yusuf’s restless hands. “Let’s just take the A2. I’ll admire from the car.”

True to his word, he never stopped admiring all the way to Taza, sometimes asking about names of structures or plants, half of which was a mystery to Yusuf. But driving like this felt closer to peace.

Though Taza was a small town that kept low to the ground, it hit them with harshness not at all unpleasant after a day spent in open spaces with little concrete.

After dinner, Yusuf went to the hotel’s top terrace and watched the flat-roofed town blinking at him. He smoked and looked into the deep darkness held over it by the mountains in the west, then at the arid plains ahead.

There was the magic in his land he couldn’t grasp but craved to feel. In that moment he felt immense peace. It was enough for him to grasp mwie’s tasbih in his palm, pass it through his fingers in silence. He wasn’t planning on dhikr but did it anyway.

Back in the room, he found Nicolò firmly asleep.

 _Sleeping like the dead_ , he thinks now, watching the light of the moon shift. It paints the brown wool of Nicolò’s blanket icy white.

“Yusuf.”

Not like the dead then.

“Give me your hand.”

Confused, Yusuf shuffles closer to drape his right arm over Nicolò’s waist, his palm brushing something warm—the bare stomach exposed by Nicolò’s shirt that must’ve ridden up in sleep.

His hand is covered by something warm and taken to rest on Nicolò’s chest. The skin of his hands is rough as he holds onto this offering but then the tip of his nose brushes the top of Yusuf’s knuckles, soft and a bit chilly. His breath is hot, though, and soon Yusuf’s skin acquires a layer of breath-vapour.

It’s terrible. It’s so very sweet.

  
  
  


When he wakes, the dawn has barely begun. His chest is sticking to Nicolò’s back, hot and uncomfortable even through the layers between them. Shifting onto his elbow, he peers into Nicolò’s lax face. Eyes unmoving, lips dry with sleep.

Yusuf needs to see the sun.

The roof terrace meets him with bone-chilling wind. He smokes, a little stunned by the colour around him. It is worth catching a cold over. Spring blue, some lavender, a bit of ripe peach.

“Got one more?”

Yusuf turns to see Nicolò approach, hugging himself in his thin denim jacket.

They perform the morning ritual of passing the cigarette pack back and forth, then the lighter. The following silence is quite new to them. Not wary, Yusuf doesn’t think, but it feels like they might be approaching an edge.

“Did you sleep?”

Yusuf shrugs. “Some. I think you had a bad dream.”

“It wasn’t bad. Just frustrating.”

He doesn’t elaborate, so they finish smoking in peace.

“I’m glad I can see this,” Nicolò nods at the view. “This day was not lost.”

“It’s only morning.”

“That’s right. Everything is clearer in the morning, you know. It all makes sense before the sun rises.”

He only half agrees.

“What?” Nicolò must read it on his face.

“This early it feels like being at the end of the world. Like you’re the only person alive.”

“Ah,” he nods. “Guess I kind of spoil it.”

“You don’t.”

Nicolò smiles, brushing his shoulder on the way down. “Take too long to get us to the coast and we’ll see.”

  
  
  


It takes a little over four hours to get to the coast, so they’re doing pretty good.

The thin blue line of the Hoceima Gulf appears on the horizon long before they reach the bay itself. It beacons him like he’s a ship lost in the fog who cuts its way through the rolling hills of the province with only that brilliant blue stipe to guide him to the ridge’s very end.

Crossing to the province, they made only one stop at a small patisserie at the Kert river crossing. Its name was Meriem, its doors intricately carved in a weak imitation of those at Agadir de Tasguent.

Sharing a plateful of overly flaky croissants, Yusuf let himself feel the impending separation.

He often found it freakishly pleasant, to live through intense emotions on the same day but hours before the event itself could occur.

It was safe, a little masochistic. Not truly in the moment, nor fully enjoying the presence of someone who is still by his side.

Instead, choosing to be frozen with dread, a lark stuck in aspic, as if rehearsing the upsetting moment he would soon enter: of saying goodbyes, of readjusting himself to the new reality of not having the person close.

It was strangely soothing to relish this ache, like pressing on a bruise. A slightly insane routine of his, he would admit, but then again such was his childhood.

A boy of the streets but comfortably fed. That was his street, his world, which he loved and hated in equal measure. A world of politeness and fear, vulgarity and piety, all mixed in one. A sanctuary of twisted morality.

And him, in the middle, still superstitious and faithful, a little bit different but kind of the same as his peers who engaged in nouiba—pleasuring one another in turn—the boys who never spoke of it but called anyone who was a little effeminate, a little open with his pleasure a _zamel_ , an _ubna_ —passive faggot, a Leila with an ass pussy—not a man, and certainly not a leader.

Yusuf was never designated as such, even avoiding it at the height of his twiggy years in early adolescence that instead saw him designated a nest of jinns who’d do himself some good visiting a marabout to save his soul.

Back then, all he did was live in the imagined moments. Moments of near future, of the _almost_. Back then, something wicked always came to his family, to Sehb and his days spent in Hay Salam running with the boys from Lot to Lot, spending many nights with hash and kif dealers who’d barely reached fifteen, listening to them shoot the shit of the new porn tape they’d caught at Chouaïb’s but he himself was thinking of the face his street mate Rachid had made that Saturday, on a warm August evening after class with the sun still high above their hideout—an abandoned concrete box that never became a house—and what a lovely face it was, Rachid pressing his head to Yusuf’s while finishing himself off, Rachid’s lips almost touching his skin.

Crazy boy, you don’t think of that.

Crazy boy, his father spat at him one night. It was a few days before his sixteenth birthday. A dog for a son.

Back in the patisserie, Nicolò tugged on his sleeve. “Where are you?”

Yusuf blinked, resurfacing. There was one croissant left.

“Back home,” Yusuf said. “The night I ran away to Beirut.”

“Why Beirut?”

“I knew it best from magazines. Or so I thought. My cousin, she was aunt’s oldest, was there at the time. She sent me to Paris a few months after, with her husband. Saint-Denis was worse back then.”

“I’m sure.” Nicolò gave him a wary glance. “What did you go to juvie for?”

“Robbery. Electronics mostly. What was your first time?”

Nicolò tore the pastry in two parts, passing one to Yusuf and shoving the other half into his pocket. “For the dogs. My first… In Genoa, drunk and disorderly. That year I dropped from the seminary.” 

Yusuf blinked. “The what now?”

They had crossed to the car by then, leaning on the side of its dust-stained bed.

“I was to be a priest. Medicine was never going to work out, not with my work ethic. Priesthood seemed logical. But then dealing coke was much more glamorous. And it paid better. The women were better too.”

“The women.”

“Rabid Catholics had too many hang-ups for my taste. I’d know, I was one.”

“And now?”

Nicolò reached inside Yusuf’s jacket, pulling the tobacco pouch from the inner pocket. “What always seemed funny to me about the family is the pretence at devotion to God. You do unspeakable things but it’s okay because family is the most important thing in life. Familia is precious. It is your God and if it isn’t, it should be.

“Until someone skims too much or does shady shit behind the board’s back. Then it’s okay to send them packing to the bottom of the bay. Church is mandatory, half of it is in local pockets. We are men of God but only when it’s profitable. Or when we’re afraid.”

“It’s not much different here,” Yusuf muses. “So when did you change your mind about God?”

“Not God. Church, maybe. But I’m not sure. You?”

“It’s still in me but… it doesn’t like to be bothered by me. Or anyone else for that matter. I think it’s too afraid to come out. Which is a bit ironic.”

“Is that what happened on the road? It came out?”

“Ask me some other time.”

And on a slow crawl along Hoceima coast now, Yusuf thinks he still doesn’t know. Nicolò proposes they stop for the night at a small Maison d'hôtes that appears neat enough.

It’s adjacent to a small rocky beach with meagre spatterings of sand that was likely trucked in. The man at the reception desk takes one look at Yusuf and recommends they try one of the small guesthouses in the village up there on the rock. Great view of the beach, he says.

“The view is decent,” Yusuf comments.

Their room reminds him too much of Rachid’s in Hay Salam, down to the single crooked window with creaky shutters.

The one here faces the sea instead of a pharmacie, but the memory is already in his mind: him and Rachid under the window, both in their late middle school years, sharing hands. Yusuf blinks it away.

Nicolò is pacing between the thin beds pressed to the opposite walls of the room as he checks his voice messages. He carries some of his earlier agitation, hair mussed by anxious hands and mouth worried by sharp teeth.

“I’ll take this one,” Nicolò says once he’s done, dropping his bag by the bed farthest from the window. “Do you think the water is too cold?”

Not terribly so, they find out soon, wading in. Around twenty degrees, maybe, Yusuf surmises.

It feels like he is rediscovering the sea all over again, having been deprived of it for so long. This sea is calm, a little filmy but close to a pure blue. Not quite reflective but playing with the late afternoon sun like a toddler with a handful of precious gems.

“I’ll be brave,” Nicolò says and sheds his clothes, throwing them onto the cold ground behind them. “I’ll be fucking brave.”

Naked save for his briefs, he does a little white-man jog in the water to maybe get rid of the gooseflesh. Yusuf watches this journey with interest. When the water reaches his waist, Nicolò curses in something that sounds Italian but isn’t the one Yusuf speaks—though he refuses to do so with Nicolò out of sheer stubbornness—and goes under.

Yusuf counts to five, then to ten. Nicolò breaks the surface at twelve, only a few paces ahead. Sputtering, shivering, happy.

“Perfect,” he yells, in intelligible Italian. Who yells? There is no need to yell when the sea is so calm. “Fucking perfect, man, get your ass in.”

“I’m good,” Yusuf yells back. “You go play.”

Behaving like a true schoolboy, Nicolò splashes around, dives, swims on his back, saying how it’s not so cold anymore, you just have to let it settle on your skin, it’s very sobering actually, good for the mind, and did you know there’s like a ton of health benefits from speed-bathing in cold water, very true, I’m not talking shit, so you better get in, cleanse yourself, brother—all right, fine, be that way, I’ll reap those benefits alone and won’t share when you’re old and sick and hacking up your cicca-loving lungs.

Soon Nicolò swims up to him and headbutts one of his dry knees. His touch is weightless where he holds onto one of Yusuf’s shins underwater, his attention elsewhere. Using Yusuf as a swim ring of sorts, he bobs in the shallows with his eyes on the small island sprawled not far from the beachfront.

“What a lovely day,” he says. “Are you hungry? I am.”

Yusuf hums. “Fattouma did invite us for dinner.”

Nicolò drifts away again and splashes for a minute longer. Some of it gets on Yusuf’s face, in his hair. It is a lovely day.

  
  
  


Dinner is bissara with tomatoes and cumin. They are invited to share the platter with Fattouma and her husband, their children long gone to build lives in Tangier, she says, not often visiting and forgetting themselves with all that filthy stuff they’ve got going with the Spanish coast.

She asks Yusuf of his parents, so he has to half-lie and invent the good parts. Nicolò changes the topic to the food, complimenting her home and her cooking. It makes her sit up a little. Her blush says she clearly appreciates his exotic white-man charm.

Deeply pleased, she tells Yusuf none of the Westerners that frequent the village are as well-raised as this one you got here.

Nicolò asks him about it after the shower when they settle in their room. Yusuf is sketching the sunset in off-black charcoal because he appreciates the challenge of mono patterns and the deftness of hand it takes to control the precise pressure they require.

“She thinks you’re well-behaved. A respectful boy, that one.”

“Nobody has ever accused me of that. I must be rubbing off on you.”

“You mean I'm rubbing off on you.”

Nicolò only shrugs.

Yusuf finishes the sketch and packs it away with the charcoal. Looking up, he sees Nicolò drag a pair of chairs from the living room and place them by the window.

They watch the sun descend. It doesn’t touch the sea line, he notices, but disappears behind the translucent shimmer of air spread thinly above it. Yusuf stacks his fists on the narrow frame, one atop the other, and settles his prickly chin on top.

He has the words. It’s taken all day but they are clear to him now.

“What you asked this morning. I think I might know the answer.”

Nicolò turns his head, cheek pressed into his folded arms, to grant all his attention.

“You asked how I believe now. And I do want to find my faith again, whatever I thought it was. But I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m back in that body. That child was not me. He was a street rat, fearless but also terrified. He was a hypocrite. He was Morocco.

“I am more than this country. This country is more than this. I am not the makhzen who abuse religion. Refusing children knowledge, taking away their native tongue. Teaching them of the world through the rigidity of belief perverted by greed, agenda, power-lust. I feel this terrible love in me all the time. It’s immense. It’s wonderful. How could I exist in Morocco that doesn’t talk of love. It’s the stuff of television, not real life.

“But isn’t it strange that we grow up loving it nonetheless. Expected to love it when we are punished for craving knowledge, when our safety is threatened. Expected to love it when we are driven away to La France, Iberia, Germany—pick your poison.

“God-consciousness is paramount, they tell us. Where is God-consciousness when they shave our heads in the back of riot vans? When women are punished for giving birth out of wedlock? When you turn to nothing for touching another human being who happens to be a man. Crazy dogs, that’s what they call us.

“But what of my grandparents’ generation born out of colonisation, the generation of my parents living through the censorship of voices, minds, and the torture of secret prisons. Shouldn’t they know better?

“Many don’t, so we have a generation of runaways. Escaping this colony of free will. Playing at freedom in Europe. Is your conduct that of a good immigrant, an unobtrusive Muslim? Are you sure? Mind if we check? That’s funny ‘cos we aren’t asking. Blink and you’ll miss the latest revision of rules and get your ass in jail for not being up to date. Blink for a little longer and you’re dead.”

“You survived it.”

“I don’t want to survive it. I wish I could feel safe for one fucking moment when I go outside.”

Nicolò says nothing.

“I wish I could define myself but all I have is guidelines. For model behaviour according to each new system. That and half a childhood dream in my pocket. I don’t know what to do with myself so I work to not think, I sleep around with loud white boys to not think. Get the scraps of acceptance to feel, I don't know, assimilated. I hate needing that validation.

“I’m Muslim but I’m not only Muslim. I don’t know what I am alone and I don’t know what I am with you. But with you, I feel less of the bad in me. And more of the good in you. Some would call it selfish, but it’s you as a person who matters, who makes it possible.”

“No, I feel that too,” Nicolò says, after a moment. “I don’t know if it’s selfish to be with you.”

“It depends. What do you see me as? A tool for… unlearning? Path to reformation? An excuse of some kind?”

Nicolò sits a little straighter. “I think it was curiosity at first. Then an obsession, of a sort. But I don’t know what it is. I just want to be near you.”

Yusuf uncurls his fists and traces the window frame with open palms, his left hand bumping into Nicolò’s elbow. “For how long?”

“I’ll be away for some time. I don’t know where you’ll be.”

“I think I’ll stay for a bit. I want to see the new baby. Eid al-Adha is next week... Either way, the Institute gave me till December. To grieve, as they put it.”

Nicolò nods. “I don’t know where I’ll be or for how long. You don’t have to wait. You don’t have to remember me. But I want to see you eventually.”

It’s strange, Yusuf thinks, to be in a state of acute vulnerability but not knowing what exactly is being said.

“Am I your friend, Nicolò?”

Their eyes meet. Nicolò watches him for a long, worried moment. His fingers come first, brushing the side of Yusuf’s head, moving to and around his ear, then lower to cradle his jaw. Through this simple gesture, Yusuf learns of how deep Nicolò’s hesitance goes. It radiates off him in waves.

“I think you’re my only friend.” Nicolò moves closer, appearing slightly dazed. His mouth goes slack, shiny and a little bit pink, so Yusuf reaches out and traces the lower lip with his thumb.

Nicolò goes still. Closes his eyes with a nervous sigh. It only takes a second for them to adjust because in the next moment Yusuf feels Nicolò’s lips wrap softly around the pad of his finger, not sucking or moving at all but just holding it.

His eyes, now open, seem to ask something which Yusuf can’t exactly get.

“You have to tell me what you want,” Yusuf says, suddenly hoarse. “Is this new?”

Nicolò moves away, licking his lips as if to chase the taste. “Not exactly. It’s something I don’t think about.”

“Have you not been thinking about it long?”

One of the shutters hits the wall, disturbed by the wind. Nicolò pulls it back, then gestures vaguely in the general vicinity of Yusuf.

“You were eating a tangerine,” he begins. “The sun was not up but it was already hot. You just came back from your shift. Didn’t shower, just woke me up because I’d asked you to, don’t remember why. You made me coffee and peeled two tangerines. You smelled of sex. I wanted to suck you off so bad that morning.”

His voice grows in surety the longer he goes on. For now, Yusuf refrains from touching and leans back. Nicolò turns in his chair, fitting his feet between the spread of Yusuf’s legs. He appears to be contemplating.

“You could’ve asked,” Yusuf says.

“I wasn’t sure of myself.”

“ _You_?”

“What I mean is, I loved being with you. I loved just… living. It’s been so long since I lived.”

Nicolò leans in. His palms travel up Yusuf’s thighs, warm through the soft fabric. Yusuf watches their path. There is no weight to it at first, not until two fingers hook under the waistband loosened by years of wear but don’t go any further, simply placing pressure to Yusuf’s skin just above the coarse hair leading to his growing arousal.

“I remember what it was,” Yusuf says. “You had an early flight. Some new kid fucked up with your Riviera buddies, I think. You complained all week. No rest for the wicked even on a well-deserved holiday.”

Nicolò closes his eyes, taking a breath as if he is ready to take a leap. It feels almost elated—as if he is getting properly high on this anticipation of euphoria. Finally, he goes down to his knees, slipping his to Yusuf’s thighs and pushing his face close—cheek tracing the outline of him, mouth tasting the hot hardness through cotton.

“I want you so much,” Nicolò says.

“Does it upset you?” Yusuf says.

“It did, at first.”

“And now?”

“I love it. I love wanting you, I love looking at you. Love hearing you speak. I think you should sing more.”

“What, now?”

Nicolò laughs. “Maybe later. Now you can… you can tell me something nice. Or you can say nothing. You can touch my hair.”

Yusuf does. It’s still damp from the shower, frizzy at the ends but pleasantly smooth at the root. Yusuf gives it a gentle tug.

“I’m going to suck you now,” Nicolò says, pulling down the joggers just enough to expose Yusuf to the cool evening air.

He goes down gradually and with skill, so open and lovely Yusuf has to brace himself a little.

“I don’t really talk a lot during sex,” Yusuf tells him a bit later, supporting Nicolò’s head with one hand and feeling for the stretch of that mouth with his thumb. “Maybe it’s the people. But I often find it awkward. It’s a little clumsy. All talkers I’ve been with just sounded like they learned sex from porn. Maybe they get off on bad lines. Do you?”

Nicolò gives a hum that’s neither here nor there. Yusuf lets himself relax—it seems the man loves doing a lot of the work involved. It’s been a while since his last decent head, so he doesn’t feel embarrassed for being brought close to coming in what feels like fifteen minutes.

It’s a lovely thing, Nicolò’s mouth, so careful and generous, reminding him of first-timers who are afraid of biting down on accident or gagging unsexily, but this feels like a choice of a seasoned dick-lover, like an act of exploration for mutual enjoyment.

At some point, he takes Yusuf’s free hand and then takes Yusuf deep in his throat. It’s borderline eclectic, this otherwise pretty normal blowjob experience, but if he’s being honest, it’s the idea of being taken care of by Nicolò and to take care of him in return that drives him close.

“Breathe,” Yusuf says, sensing the new strain in his throat. “You’ll choke.”

Nicolò frees his mouth, wiping at it, and looks at him. Eyes shining, a little teary, full of strange happiness. “I want you to lick your come off my face. How do you feel about this idea?”

It’s an all right idea, so Yusuf nods, giving Nicolò free reign to finish him off with his mouth and hands. It’s certainly helping that his breath is shot to shit, brushing hotly alongside the determined touch of his tongue. Yusuf lets go.

“Ah,” Nicolò says at the first touch of release on his hot face. “Come on.”

The encouragement must be for himself, though, because Yusuf sees his free hand slipping to give his arousal some relief, jeans and all while he catches the rest with his cheeks, his mouth, on the top of his chin.

“Come here,” Yusuf tells him, tucking himself back in. “Up, up, up.”

Palms planted on Yusuf’s thighs, Nicolò leans into him with a face so open it hurts. Eyes closed in bliss, he takes Yusuf’s tongue with a sweet exhalation of breath.

“Your beard’s burning me,” Nicolò mutters, content to have Yusuf licks at his skin, only measured at first, then lapping broadly at his chin and cheeks. “I like it. Can you kiss me?”

Yusuf does. It’s chaste for a few quiet moments. Then he licks Nicolò’s warm, sticky lips, before pushing into his mouth tongue-first. Nicolò kisses dirty and deep, welcoming the wetness and the minute ache of it.

After, he rubs his palms over Yusuf’s bristly cheeks while finger-mapping his kiss-swollen lips. There is a nasty crick in his neck, Yusuf registers, still looking up at Nicolò who seems content to watch him from above.

“You have a really nice face,” Nicolò tells him. What a strange thing to say.

“You have a nice face too,” Yusuf replies, fitting his thumb over the small dip in Nicolò’s chin. “What do you want to do?”

Nicolò leans close to smell Yusuf’s hair, his neck. Then he opens his mouth softly as if to share their breaths, his lips catching slightly at the corner of Yusuf’s mouth. They stay like this for a moment longer. Then Nicolò whispers, “Just this for now. How do you feel about that?”

“I feel nice about that.”

“Do you want to fuck later?”

“Sure,” Yusuf says. “When?”

“In a bit. And maybe in the morning. And maybe in the car too.”

“We're too old for this.”

Nicolò’s laugh is bright and silly. He looks a little silly with dry come in his hair and face bright with delight.

“We’ll see,” he says. “I always wanted to fuck in a car, like in that movie about desert cave art and war.”

“Oh, you’re a real gourmet. Nothing gets you harder than desert and death.”

“Evidently.”

“Go wash up,” Yusuf tells him, reaching for his art bag again. “I'd like to draw you, if you’re not opposed.”

Later, Nicolò sits under the window, droplets glimmering in the dying light. It’s a subtle shade of pink. It goes well with his exhaustion and quiet joy. “Should I be naked for this?”

“Do whatever you want.”

Nicolò leaves the shirt on and loses the sleeping pants. One leg bent at the knee, a wrist placed delicately over it. Staged but somehow natural.

It’s good practice, Yusuf notes, giving his frame lighter lines but emphasising the silhouette, the shape of his nose. The perpetual fatigue of his eyes is shown with lines that appear erratic though they are anything but, laid carefully under his lower lids. It’s passable for a first depiction.

“You made me look better,” Nicolò tells him.

Before they fall asleep in the nest of blankets haphazardly-arranged on the floor, Nicolò asks to keep it.

  


* * *

  


“I changed my mind.”

Yusuf looks up. Nicolò is carefully studying the sea from his uncomfortable spot on one of the beach rocks.

“About?”

“I do want you to remember me.”

Placing the sketchbook on the beach blanket, Yusuf turns his full attention to the strange man who seems to prefer the prickly surfaces of coastal rocks to softer blankets. “I’m sure you’ll be back on the French business sooner than you think.”

“It’s not like that. I’m being relocated to Spain.”

“I see.”

“I just wanted to be done with it.”

Yusuf blinks. “You did?”

“I had a plan. It was stupid.” He moves to sit next to Yusuf, gingerly tracing the new drawing of himself. “I think I’m ready to collect that morning fuck now.”

Afterwards, they wash in the sea and gather their things from the house. The road to Tangier is mostly silent with local pop radio helping Yusuf to keep it together. Fucking keep it together.

“I like this song,” Nicolò announces at some point.

They’ve been on the road for roughly three hours, going straight for Tangier without any stops or breaks or detours. It sure is a perfect match to Yusuf’s reeling mind.

Right, the song that Nicolò likes. Oh, it’s one of Warda’s hits that his mother used to like.

“Yusuf,” Nicolò says, pointing to the left side of the road, half a kilometre ahead, “I like that grove. Is it cedar?”

Yusuf gives him a look and flashes the blinkers. Parking in a grove proves to be a little harder than expected, but he manages with some choice words and Nicolò’s obnoxious laughter to fuel his irritation. 

When he rounds the truck to climb into its bed, Nicolò has already settled on the blanket with his shirt pulled to his armpits and jeans undone. He is stroking himself, eyes on Yusuf’s form, and smiling somewhat mysteriously.

“This couldn’t be done in the car?” Yusuf wonders, stretching next to him and watching him go at it. It’s pretty engaging, Nicolò is a performer when he needs to be.

“I thought you could fuck my thighs, no?”

Yusuf curses and accepts the lubricant which Nicolò unearthed from seemingly nowhere. Did he pack it in France? This must be one of the longest game played where Yusuf is concerned.

“Where was this in the morning?”

“I like getting you off with my hands,” Nicolò says, thoughtful. “But we passed that filling station, right, and I thought fuck, we are two hours out, and I want to have something in my wank bank.”

All right, Yusuf thinks, pleased with the idea but bewildered by the timing and wondering at his own behaviour—he hasn’t been this keen on impromptu sex since maybe his mid-twenties.

But the sigh with which Nicolò takes his touch fully justifies it in his eyes. The skin of Nicolò’s thighs is not soft but more tender than anywhere else he’s felt him so far. They press close, chest to back, mouth to cheek. Yusuf slicks him up slowly, wanting for it to be an act of closeness rather than a prelude, and drinks Nicolò’s quiet murmurs along with his encouraging words and generous praise.

“Hold it tight, yeah?” Yusuf says needlessly and slides in.

It’s strange—he’s only done it once with a passing fancy he met in Cairo on a field trip for the Ipa course, and that event was more sweat and anxiety than pleasure. Nicolò holds him as tight as Yusuf does him with his arms wrapped firmly, but he wishes he could go all the more closer.

“Slower,” Nicolò says, hands stroking lazily over his own cock. His hips push slightly back to meet Yusuf’s snug not-quite thrusts.

“Touch me,” Nicolò says later, craning his neck for a kiss and guiding Yusuf’s hand so they could get him off together.

“I can’t kiss you like this,” Yusuf laughs, watching Nicolò try to chase to the release.

“Kiss me however you like. And finish up now.”

Yusuf laughs and fucks in a little tighter, sliding along the tender skin between Nicolò’s legs, making him gasp. Something compels him to kiss his cheek. He comes with Nicolò still hard but very content, after which Yusuf helps him onto his back and slides down, taking him in one go. It’s a pretty fast affair, a little desperate and overly sweaty. In the aftermath, he spits half and swallows the rest.

He can’t be mad at their strange spur of adolescence anymore. Not with Nicolò flushed all the way to his neck and shining with sweat, not when Nicolò accepts him into his warm, damp embrace and says, “E così se ne va la signora in giallo.”

The rest of the drive feels less heavy. In Tangier, they spend their three hours before the ferry’s departure by the quay. Their space is filled with inane talk, utterly mundane words. Almost like using a cushion before spending a night on rocks.

There is no contact between them but Yusuf feels completely tethered. Their last meal is spent over tea and mantecados which Nicolò proceeds to criticise to the last crumb. Going back to the port threatens Yusuf with the old familiar dread but it dissipates, leaving only something like wistfulness in its wake.

They wait out the last half-hour watching the people. At fifteen minutes, an old German couple asks Nicolò to take their picture in front of the boat. At ten, they don’t talk at all.

“I’ll call you,” Nicolò says out of nowhere. Five minutes. “From Livorno. Or when I’m at the wedding.”

“Do as you like.”

They’re in full view of the ferry’s top deck, the entire expanse of the port, but Nicolò reaches for his hand anyway. It could be mistaken for a friend’s touch—Nicolò is one, after all—until he lifts the palm to his mouth. It’s only a chaste press of lips. To each of Yusuf’s knuckles, then to the centre of his hand.

Nicolò lets go just as quick. “Sorry. I had to have something.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Yusuf tucks one stray strand behind Nicolò’s ear, then thumbs at the piercing, “you can be so sweet, it’s enough to drive me insane.”

It earns him a smile—this one is as sweet as the kiss. “Don’t go too far. I’ll see you.”

“See you.”

He waits for the ferry to disappear, taking the moment to collect his mutilated, confused brain, and returns to the car. 

  
  
  


Salé greets him with a stormy evening. He’s returned the Frontier despite having a week more to his rental, but leaving it in his neighbourhood wouldn’t be so smart. Though he hasn’t been all that smart this past year, has he?

Yusuf enters his parents’ old room, now belonging to Hafsia’s children. He finishes the dua from the other day. And in the name of Allah we leave. And upon our Lord we place our trust.

The traces of his and Nicolò’s shared night are long gone. He decides the pretence of seeing the man’s touch still present in this space is comforting. It grounds him in a strange way. It’s of the old and the new, it’s Yusuf decompressed. 

How stupid it seems now, after all, he’s not even spent a week on the road but it feels like an eternity well earned. And he’s always liked the exhaustion of car travel, a bone-deep, blissful ache of work and accomplishment that transforms into something beautiful and deeply sad upon returning home.

It’s not home and he feels impossibly tired but his chest is full. It feels safe, entirely and wholly safe.

Deep in his pocket, his phone comes alive.

It was only this morning that Nicolò looked at him in the pre-dawn blues, breath in tune with the quiet surf outside, and asked him what the tattoo on his left thigh meant. It’s from a poem, Yusuf told him, like a confession of something strangely sacred, by this man called Ahmed Bouanani. He had beautiful and painful things to say of this country and its people, of himself and of everyone like and unlike him. It says:

_I too would have liked to say my love_

_despite the mud despite the blood_

_I would have liked to say: I love you_

_as one might have said: I am alive._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sponsored by: [nena](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReyXd8aIe3w) by yendry;  
>  _songs mentioned: 'roh ya zaman' by samira said, 'batwanes beek' by warda;_  
>  _poetry quotes from ahmed bouanani's 'memory fourteen' and 'love poem for naïma';_
> 
> if you somehow finished this and maybe even enjoyed it, thank you for being here. thank you for giving it your time. all my love.


End file.
